OpenAI: GPT-6 Astra Designed a Codex Companion Device in a Week

OpenAI says two hardware engineers used its GPT-6 Astra model to design a working prototype of a Codex companion device, as a side project, in under a week. The gadget, a push-to-talk puck with a small display built for researcher Justin Lin so he can check on his coding agents without opening a laptop, is what OpenAI internally labels a "TamaGPT device experiment." The Decoder reports that "Astra handled every step, from enclosure design and PCB layout with component selection and trace routing to firmware and the user interface," with the team generating the designs without direct human edits during the design phase.

Manufacturing was less clean. "Obviously, took a few rounds with the factory, but this is what came back," Lin said in materials R&D World summarized, noting the contract manufacturer needed several revision rounds because Astra "didn't always account for manufacturing constraints, tolerances, and assembly details." A small batch of prototypes came back in under a month.

The benchmark line in the post may be the more interesting detail. An unreleased "internal model" scores 0.875 on BenchCAD 2.0, which tests whether a model can reconstruct 3D parts from multi-view renders by generating CAD code. GPT-6 Astra, at its highest reasoning setting, hits 0.594. OpenAI also says token usage across its hardware teams has grown 23x since February, with Codex and ChatGPT now embedded in CAD models, manufacturing drawings and simulations for robotics and compute infrastructure.

The post lands amid a steady beat of OpenAI product news; our coding-tools tracker has logged 128 stories over the last 90 days. OpenAI has separately said it is building its own consumer device, positioned somewhere between an AI speaker and a smartphone.