They did revolutionise software development in-house. Both Codex/Claude Code are 90% agent written these days, and bring in billions of dollars of revenue.
Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.
Cloning Slack would bring in $0 dollars.
Neither of those software are primarily responsible for the revenue, either. The actual models underlying them are, not the trivial CLI chat interface (which, despite being trivial software, still manages to be full of bugs that go unfixed for months). I also don't even think it's true that Codex is primarily agent-written. OpenAI specifically cited using Electron in their recent Codex desktop application for "agent orchestration" to save human developer time on porting it across platforms, which does not sound like a successful exercise in eating their dog food.
So they say.