For Datadog’s engineering teams, that makes code review a high-stakes moment. It’s not just about catching mistakes, but about understanding how changes ripple through interconnected systems—an area where traditional static analysis and rule-based tools often fall short.

To meet this challenge, Datadog’s AI Development Experience (AI DevX) team turned to Codex, the coding agent from OpenAI, which brings system-level reasoning into code review and surfaces risks humans can’t easily see at scale.

“Time savings are real and important,” says Brad Carter, who leads Datadog’s AI DevX team. “But preventing incidents is far more compelling at our scale.”

Effective code review at Datadog traditionally relied heavily on senior engineers—the people who understand the codebase, its history, and the architectural tradeoffs well enough to spot systemic risk.