OpenAI's Codex installs jumped roughly 10x in five months, from 100,000 to over a million per day
A single usage chart for Codex NPM installs tells a sharp story about how fast OpenAI's coding tool has moved from niche to mainstream.
A chart of Codex NPM installs, meaning installs made directly through a terminal interface, shows the tool going from roughly 100,000 per day in January 2026 to over a million per day by May 2026. Recent spikes have pushed that figure to 1.5 and 1.8 million per day, according to Nathaniel Whittemore, who flagged the data.
They were at about 100,000 a day in January and are at over a million a day right now. In fact, in the last couple of days they've surged up to 1.5 and 1.8 million. Nathaniel Whittemore
The growth is worth reading alongside OpenAI’s own stated capability timeline. Nathan Labenz noted that OpenAI has publicly forecast reaching ML research intern-level performance later this year and a full AI R&D researcher by early 2028. Rapid Codex adoption fits a pattern where developer-facing tools are outpacing the broader public’s sense of where AI capability actually sits.
The installs are a proxy, not a revenue figure, and terminal-based installs can be inflated by automated pipelines. Still, a roughly 10x move in under five months is a concrete signal of adoption momentum, not just product buzz.