How Wasmer used Codex to build a Node.js runtime for the edge

Engineers at Wasmer experienced a breakthrough this year: They figured out how to run Node.js workloads inside a WebAssembly sandbox, enabling developers to run JavaScript apps, MCPs, and agents without Docker. This effort would have taken one year without Codex, but with Codex, it took two weeks. Now, they’re the first cloud host to provide full Node.js at the edge layer.

“We are actually moving out of the IDE itself. We’re not touching as much the code, we are just guiding it where we want it to go.”

—Syrus Akbary Nieto, Founder and CEO

Building with renewed ambition

Wasmer is a young company with a small team and a big goal: an edge computing platform that scales across local and global environments without platform restrictions.

“The kinds of projects that we are taking on are incredibly ambitious, and it would have taken us ages to do them without AI,” says Syrus Akbary Nieto, Founder and CEO. “Now, things are way simpler and faster.”

That simplicity and speed translated directly into a groundbreaking project: Edge.js⁠(opens in a new window), a JavaScript runtime that can run Node.js workloads for AI and edge computing.

It’s a project the team had long wanted to take on, but they didn’t always have the resources to do it. “Everyone here is very, very technical, but we just didn’t have the time to dedicate to these projects. And now, we can launch new products that would have been impossible before,” explains Nieto.

With Codex, Wasmer engineers can multiply their efforts. “We have increased development speed by 10x to 20x, at least,” says Nieto.

“We were able to create a JavaScript runtime in just two weeks. Without AI and without Codex, it would have taken us easily one year.”

—Syrus Akbary Nieto, Founder and CEO

Reasoning across languages and levels of code

“There are certain subtleties that we don’t know of because we are not experts in C++. Codex was able to spot them pretty early.”

—Syrus Akbary Nieto, Founder and CEO