OpenAI builds Pando, a Git-compatible backend, after Codex drives a 1,378% commit surge

OpenAI disclosed Pando, a Git-compatible storage backend it built because coding agents overwhelmed its existing infrastructure. Codex pushed internal commit volume up 1,378%, and Pando cut median push latency by nearly five times. It was reportedly built largely by agents in about 10 weeks.

Greg Brockman said OpenAI 'took the hard road of continuing to use Git'. Pando speaks the Git protocol, so developers' tools and workflows don't change while the backend scales to very large monorepos. He added that OpenAI is considering offering Pando to others and invited interested teams to email him.

The story points to a second-order effect of agentic coding: version control, CI and code review were designed for human-paced commits. When agents generate an order of magnitude more changes, the bottleneck moves into infrastructure. If OpenAI productizes Pando, it would compete with GitHub, which is owned by its largest partner, Microsoft, and with monorepo tooling from Meta and Google.

The caveats are that the figures are OpenAI's own and that 'built by agents' claims rarely say how much human review was involved. The useful signal is the 1,378% figure itself, a rare concrete measure of agent throughput inside a frontier lab.