OpenAI reports early Astra and Codex gains in physical engineering workflows
OpenAI reported that two people used Astra to design a small device in under a week and a manufacturer produced prototypes in under a month, while manufacturing readiness still required several review rounds. It also reported 23-fold token-usage growth across internal hardware teams and an internal BenchCAD 2 score of 0.875 for a newer model versus 0.594 for Astra.
Why it matters: CAD, PCB, simulation and manufacturing workflows are emerging as a distinct agent frontier, but physical tolerances and review cycles make model-generated artifacts materially harder to validate than text or code.