Virgin Atlantic uses Codex to ship app faster with fewer bugs

Virgin Atlantic says OpenAI’s Codex helped it ship a revamped mobile app in time for the Christmas travel rush, a period the airline described as one of the highest-risk windows for introducing bugs. Neil Letchford, vice president of digital engineering, said the company had to be especially careful because customers use the app to check in and board flights.

“We’re an operational airline, so we have to be very careful about when we deliver applications to our customers live,” Letchford said. “People are flying with this application. They need to be able to check in, and they need to be able to get on their aircraft.”

According to Virgin Atlantic, Codex helped the team launch the app in beta over Christmas and move it into production weeks later. The airline said it reached near-complete unit test coverage and had zero P1 defects at launch. P1 defects are the highest-priority bugs, the kind that can block release or cause serious service issues.

Letchford said that level of quality is hard to achieve when a team is working to a fixed launch date. He said engineering teams often have to reduce scope or compromise on testing to meet deadlines, but Codex let Virgin Atlantic do the opposite.

“The ability to utilize Codex to improve the quality of the application before it got into the hands of our customers was a breakthrough for us,” Letchford said.

Virgin Atlantic also said Codex is changing how it handles older code. The company said codebases it has maintained for years are now being refactored in hours instead of weeks. Letchford said some refactoring work has seen a 78% to 80% reduction in codebase size when Codex is used.

“We’re seeing gains in the refactoring space where a two-week piece of work now maybe takes about 30 minutes to an hour,” he said.

The speedup is affecting front-end development too. In one recent sprint, the airline said one of its lead front-end developers built a complete working front-end application from a Figma prototype in a week, with the backend stubbed out. Letchford said the Scrum master’s complaint was that backend tickets were not ready yet.

Codex is also being used on Virgin Atlantic’s data side. Richard Masters, vice president of data and AI, said the tool has helped the company de-risk database migrations onto its core data warehouse. He said analyst teams can now prototype internal applications directly against the warehouse in a few hours, or even during a workshop.

“You can develop that data through to a prototype in a matter of literally a couple of hours, or within a workshop even,” Masters said.

Virgin Atlantic said teams across network planning, customer experience, and engineering and maintenance are now building their own internal applications with Codex instead of sending requests through the central Data and AI team. Masters said that shift is moving the tool beyond pure engineering work.

“We’re seeing gains in the refactoring space where a two-week piece of work now maybe takes about 30 minutes to an hour,” Letchford said. The company now says the next challenge is scaling that use across the full software development lifecycle, not just in isolated teams.