Codex clearly explained (and how to use it)

Some of my smartest friends are saying open AI's codex is the super app for AI. They're saying you pair that with GPT 5.5 images 2.0 and use codex's interface and you are going to be unstoppable. So I called my friend Riley Brown to convince me that I should be using codex with all these models and in this episode we go through everything how to use it from A to Z how to create skills how to connect it to notion how to use emotion to create beautiful videos if you've been meaning to get good at codex but you haven't had a second well this is your episode your infrared treat and if you want to show some love to me and Riley give this a like and comment and I'll see you in there. We are blessed to have Riley Brown back on the pod Riley by the end of this episode of what are people going to get out of this. People are going to learn how to use the best interface to use AI agents in my opinion. I think codex by open AI and that means if you have a chat GPT subscription you have access to codex which I think is the most powerful way to use AI agents and we're going to learn the platform and we're going to talk about GPT 5.5 which was released yesterday as of filming this. I don't know when this episode will be out. We'll talk a little bit about browser use and you know I've been a little skeptical about AI controlling browsers. I think it's kind of slow and a little boring. This is the first time that I see it I'm like oh it's actually starting to be faster and I could definitely see by the end of the year these browser agents are going to be as fast as humans so we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about computer use. We're going to talk about just doing all of your knowledge work and coding work inside one single platform which is codex. How does that sound? This well I just have to be honest with you. I got to say something. I am not on codex today. In fact I have never downloaded codex. It's just I'm not in that world okay and this episode for me is a firsthand basically tour hacks tips and tricks by the end of this episode I want to be converted. I want to be converted to codex in that ecosystem. I hope so but I might be wrong. By the end of this episode I might be like you know what I'm just going to stick with my own stack and you know this is there's just a lot of smoke here so let's see. No for sure you know what and I want to preface this by saying like I don't hate on anyone for using any stack. I think it's kind of dumb to do that. I think you have you should pick a stack and you should stick with it. I think moving from hot tool to hot tool is actually not the right strategy if you're using cloud code inside cursor right if you use cursor for all your knowledge work and that works for you great just keep doing that if you want. I'm kind of permanently switching to codex just because you know I work with seven engineers and all of them have switched to codex and we agree that it's pretty amazing and you can use cloud code inside of it which is another bonus but if you don't mind I just kind of want to hop into kind of an escala draw kind of do a little precursor to codex if that's cool with you. Yeah okay so yeah so I like to start with the basic seven really trying to get people to understand the difference between chat GPT and codex and so a good way to think about codex is it is a state-of-the-art AI agent on your computer which is the codex model or the GPT 5.5 model in a nice interface that allows you to build an app create any type of document control your computer and create automations. You can see that right this is the codex interface it looks a lot like chat GPT right this is a new chat on codex and what I like to do whenever I create a new like whenever I go to codex and let's say I'm working on a new app maybe I'm working on the startup ideas podcast landing page and then I'm also doing some market research so we can actually create a new project and we can actually start from an existing folder and let's just call this folder Greg or let's call it startup ideas podcast and we can just create a new folder and this folder will be over here on the side can you see this maybe I'll zoom in a little bit and anytime I hit new chat this chat will show up in here as you can see here I have all my threads over here on the side and they're all kind of organized notice there wasn't anything in this one you can very easily just remove these from the side so it's just like you have your folder and your chats within each folder which is just a project and so like research startup ideas podcast look at his videos and so I have a skill which is YouTube researcher and this allows me to immediately pull transcripts from YouTube channels so I can say like take the transcripts from his last 10 videos and tell me only what he's doing wrong be negative make a report and so then you can fire this off and what I like is it's very tailored to multitasking so I can press command n and this interface is a little similar to Manus if you've ever used Manus before it's very easy to see which what your agents are doing right if it's done you'll see a blue dot as you can see here these two are done these are kind of like unread chat so like it means it's done and I haven't clicked on it yet while it's working it kind of spins around and so like what is the startup ideas podcast and so you can see here it kind of just organizes chats into threads and what we're seeing is this is kind of the dominant interface to interact with AI agents you can see here this is the new Claude code desktop app right here you can see their code feature it's very similar you have these folders with chats underneath it and if you've seen the new cursor interface it's very similar so all of these companies are deciding that this is kind of the correct interface to interact with AI agents it just so happens that I think Codex is the best one so let's go back to to our and so the way that I see it is like in 2025 that was the year of the two we right we had we had this type of interface with cloud code and it's kind of a it's bittersweet because I missed these early days of using cloud code I loved the terminal it was really fun and I think back to the early days when you and and a few others were talking about vibe marketing and I think the result I think it was super directionally correct using AI agents to do a lot of marketing tasks I just think I'm curious to hear what your observation was is this just wasn't a great interface for a lot of the people who wanted to to get the benefits from it but they didn't want to open a terminal or create skills like in these files I think people in business just want an easier interface to do all of these agentic workflows and so what all these companies are deciding on is that the GUI is better so we're moving from a terminal interface to a more clean simple interface you have your chats on the left your agent in the middle and then whatever the agent is working on on the right another way that I like to think about this is cloud code or this codex is like cloud code and co-work in a single product but it's even better than that and the reason I like it more than cloud desktop is cloud made a decision to split up co-work and cloud code I would definitely try cloud more if they didn't do this I do not like them just like they decided that people who are in business are going to use one product people who want a code are going to use this other product they have different limitations right you can't just ask co-work to build an app you have to go to cloud code to do that cloud co-work has different sets of permissions than cloud code and you know me I'm super hyped on vibe coding I think vibe coding has gotten so easy that like 95% of the things that you would want to code it's as easy as creating a presentation so I think and all the PowerPoint doc sorry if I'm kind of jumping around here but within the codex app codex app is I can create this this app right here so this is an app this is a I posted this on Twitter yesterday this is in one prompt this is like a train simulator and it's super good at physics and this is me just testing the model having fun and I even added a crash counters these trains can crash into each other and it's presented by all state but the point is is in the same interface you can create an application and you can also create spreadsheets as you can see here it can create charts spreadsheets you can also create word docs you can edit and export these word docs and you can create PowerPoint presentations and you can export them with different apps so you can export this to canva and this will just open it up directly in canva so I can make further edits and they're going to add more exporting features as time goes on because me as a startup founder I'm constantly making all types of docs and I'm making a lot of landing pages lead magnets I want to do it all in one interface and so that's kind of the main reasons that I use codex any thoughts so far a million thoughts but the biggest thought I have is what you're basically saying is this codex is the fastest way to do the most amount of things basically yes it is and it got all the primitives right and okay actually we can dive into some more of the reasons that like these are why I like codex over certain tools there's a lot of reasons I like it that these things are also in cursor and are in the cloud desktop app but here are the things that only codex does or codex does better than all of them right it is the only interface that does vibe coding and knowledge work in one platform if you go to cursor and ask for a doc you know it'll give you it can like create html file and run it in the browser but it can't just create a doc and let you view it like a cloud artifact in one interface you can do this on cloud desktop app but again you have to go to this code code code work feature I'm not a fan of co work at all which may be a narrative violation on your channel I don't know if you've been talking about cloud code work that's okay I haven't I haven't but I'm intrigued with cloud code work personally I you know spend most of my time in cloud code but I was thinking of doing a full on episode on like co work because it's one of one of the questions I get asked the most which is should I be using co work and how how to best use it but don't don't wouldn't you wish that cloud code could just do what co work could do from the same interface yeah yeah and so to me I don't see any good reason why you wouldn't allow cloud code to do the stuff that co work could do and so that that's just my beef with cloud code work and that's why I've been annoyed by it and I haven't made any videos on it it's because every time I try and use it I run into some sort of like limitation because the way that they set up the the environment where the agents can do stuff there's way more restrictions on co work which makes it super annoying to use in my opinion anyway I think codex models are better at really complex tasks and we actually we know this for sure we've tested this extensively as a team you know we're highly incentivized to write the best code and write it fastest for in the quickest amount of time and codex just does a better job with infrastructure with really hard tasks I've one shot it the other day I one shot it an app like replete a vibe coding tool that spung up sandboxes and you could vibe code web apps on your phone in one shot it took an hour and 20 minutes to generate the code and this was on 5.4 it's pretty impressive so if you remember last year open AI started working on Atlas I thought it was kind of I was just like damn they're kind of losing focus they're you they're building this Atlas feature um you know it's the standalone browser how many people are going to use it well recently they had like this big red alert at their company and they decided to kind of push all of their efforts into one single app which was codex and now what they're doing is they're just putting Atlas inside they're basically putting Atlas inside like this is the Atlas browser and I know this by interacting with people at open AI this is going to become a full web browser so you're going to be able to log in it'll remember your login info and so instead of having like a web browser with all of your tabs open and you have to decide what task you need to use instead you'll start a chat with an AI and the browser will be there right on the right and you're you'll you'll have different windows open for the specific task and I think that's just a better way to do knowledge work you know and you can just open up tabs directly in the app that you're creating whatever it is that you want to create and you'll be able to open up notion and you can download the notion plugin and so you can have your AI edit notion and you'll have notion open directly in the app in the web browser which I find to be pretty cool and so that's another thing they also have a built-in remotion plugin and because their web browser is the best you know I created this video the other day oh boy I've been doing a lot on here and remotion for those people who don't know is what so remotion and by the way in three hours I'll be launching a video on how to use codex for remotion remotion turns code into videos so you can create motion graphic videos with code well guess what lucky luckily for you AI will write all that code so you can just create you can just type out what motion graphic scene you want and it will create it and Claude as many people in your audience know Claude has went on this massive run of launches every single day and and by the way it's reconnecting I think codex is getting a lot of load right now like there's just a lot of people using it you're talking about it you know yeah talking about you're out there saying you know it's super app it's the best you know it's where you should be spending your time you want to bet on open AI and then all of a sudden it's reconnecting yeah dude I mean what can I say well I'll try and be quiet before we shoot our next video I'll just pin this ideally it'll just work in just a second we don't need to show it for now but the point is you can generate really high quality motion graphic videos and and frock did this when they first started doing their product launches they were just launching them with remotion videos and it's really good for software products where you like have something happening on a user interface you can generate the user interface you can generate the motion and the thing that's really cool about codex is you can just search the remotion plugin and once you enable the remotion plugin any chat that you use you can say at remotion and you can say at remotion please create a video and then I created another skill which is is called internet image polar it doesn't just pull images it pulls all of the assets for any given company from the internet so it might work for 10 minutes it'll pull all of a brand's assets put it in an HTML file and then remotion or codex can have all of that information for remotion so it can use your logo it can use your colors it can use your fonts in the video you don't have to like manually tell it what to do it'll just pull all of that information and so that's a really fun way and this is how we do a lot of our launch videos and some have gotten over a million views so this is a really useful thing it was just really annoying to use with all of the other tools codex is the only one where you can just at remotion and it opens directly in the app yeah and you know for for people who aren't super familiar with remotion it's not just that it you know takes concepts and turns turns the videos into code or you know creates videos that are code these videos are so high quality it is actually insane like actually like I've I know multiple people who've gone from zero to a hundred thousand Instagram followers by doing remotion videos now they're high quality remotion videos and they go back and forth and back and forth I'm not saying you one prompted and you get the best possible you know videos but these are is that remotion right here yeah so this is seven seven like almost 800,000 views this is all remotion you can't hear it but like you can create motion graphic videos yeah and it's really easy to just like create pretty simple videos and I think when you're doing a launch video if it's a good idea you should try and keep it as simple as possible never have multiple things happening at once oh okay it just popped up it's it's testing if it's running but like this is what would run on the side of your screen and it will in just a second but it literally creates this like cap cut like timeline and so this is and so these are all of your compositions and so here we have this demo that I made yesterday and this was in one shot and the reason why I was able to generate this in one shot is I actually have this thing called brand assets this contains all of the assets that I might want to use and so once you've generated a video with all of your brand assets you can just reference that to your AI and you could say hey please use this background or use this component or use this logo and you notice here I just labeled all of these logos here and so I can always say like please look at the brand assets use the x logo the YouTube logo the TikTok logo and the cursor logo and put it in this video in this scene and so if you just get everything that you might want to use in here it's easy to tell your AI to to use it later if that makes sense anyway you can create videos and you can open it right here in the browser as you can see I took a little bit because codex is running a little slow but this is kind of like in everything app which is which is pretty cool and then to to to finalize why I use it over other ones is the computer use is better it is faster than any computer use that I've used before and this means you download computer use as part of codex it can literally control your computer not only can it control your computer it can control multiple of your apps at the same time which is a mind-blowing experience and you can see the mouse moving around on your device I had it controlling Canva yesterday it was moving around pretty fast controlling Canva it exported the right document and it fed it back in the codex it was a really fun workflow and that's just a really cool experience I highly recommend trying this just to kind of see where AI is at in terms of computer use and then as I talked about earlier it can control the browser that's directly inside codex so pretty soon we'll live in a world where an AI will be able to go to any site open the browser you're going to be logged in so it'll have all of your login information it'll be a full browser like Atlas and it will be able to take any action so there will be basically no limitation to what it can do and then they release this new chronicle feature so that it kind of like remembers everything so it'll kind of and this one might have some privacy stuff that you might want to look into if you're super big on privacy this is my work computer and I like testing stuff too much so I had to enable it but it basically watches your screen for context so you don't have to explain yourself again it just kind of knows what you're working on and it stores these as like little codex memories and it allows you to stay in flow so you can move chats around you don't really need to be that organized the AI will just kind of have context over what you're doing and these are kind of the main reasons I really like so I didn't know about chronicle first time I've ever heard of that is it worth I know there's privacy issues and security issues and another common section is gonna not love it but from a productivity standpoint are you seeing meaningful uptick so I they released it two days ago so I'm not gonna lie there's been way too many things to test but if you go to personalization and you scroll down and go to chronicle I recommend learning more this is not an endorsement I'm using a work laptop I test everything I go unlimited permissions on I don't care about the privacy stuff I'm testing everything that's what I do I love it too much so by no means am I telling you to do this and that it's worth the risk I have no idea what the risk is but you should look into it because it is an interesting technology at the very least right having an AI assuming it's secure and everything having an AI that understands what you're working on so that when you type something it knows exactly what you're referencing that is inherently useful whether or not it works really well it's up up for debate I haven't tested it long enough you know it came up two days ago so what else do I need to know like because I'm downloading codex for the first time so what are things in terms of setup and emotion I'm gonna add projects I understand plugins yeah so yeah let's talk about plugins so plugins you know there's a lot of words right now I'm people talk about ncp's they talk about plugins they talk about skills they talk about integrations connectors right you have all of these words and if I'm being honest the difference between them is very blurry right just kind of I clump all of those words together and I just call them skills it just makes sense in my brain right you have an AI agent by default that's really smart it can search the web it can it can create apps but if you don't give it any skills then it's it's only gonna be a generic model what you need to do is you need to give your agent access to the tools that you already use to make it useful for your workflows and so here they call them plugins and again skills and plugins you can create your own skill you can't actually build your own plugin unless you get it approved by open AI so that's kind of the the difference plugins are more official and so one of the plugins that I use is Slack so it's connected to our Slack I can ask any question you know we have like 30 channels as a company and I can just ask AI to summarize everything that pertains to me and because codex keeps memories of me and I've given it a document that I've told what I think is important it can find the things that are important it'll surface them to me and you can also connect it to your email so it can send and receive emails or you can like tell you who emailed you if something's really important and you can connect it up to notion you can connect it to sheets and you know pretty soon you're going to be able to do it for all of them the expo one is pretty useful it allows you to kind of view a mobile app preview directly inside codex which is really cool and then obviously remotion and canva you can just connect it to your existing tools and if you don't find the tool that you want to use in plugins you can create your own skill and you do that simply by creating a new chat and you say I want to create a new skill that does whatever blank and then you can also say use the slash skill wait I think it's at skill oh maybe they don't have it anymore to reference a skill you use a slash to reference plugins you use the at mention which I think is weird I think they should combine all of them right so I could say use computer use at browser use to use a skill you do a slash and you can see all the slashes here I don't see they used to have a skill builder skill but they don't have it I think it's just smart enough to just say create a skill and it'll just create it after you create a skill it'll show up here in this tab and here all the skills that I've created I've created it's so confusing right because like you create a skill and then it puts it into the plugins tab oh no no a skill is in the skills tab oh yeah yeah you're right it's in the plugins tab as plugins and skills and so I think this is super messy right that's why I think they should just combine it all into skills or pick one and just stick with it because it is super confusing and the fact that they have the different like you have an at for plugins and then you have a slash for skills I find to be like kind of annoying but I will say I've tried all of these tools this is the simplest version that exists yet okay and then in the simplest way possible what is the difference between a skill and a plugin honestly I think plugins are just like a deeper integration I would be lying to you if I knew the technical thing I just know that like if you're a company and you want to create an official plugin you go to open AI and you create it with them it's similar to you remember the apps SDK on chat GPT it's more of an official right there's a reason why you know we can't just we couldn't just spend the rest of this video making the the gray eyes and brick plugin and then get it approved right after this video you'd have to reach out to open AI you know I'm sure they have thousands of companies trying to create plugins and you can only imagine the value of showing up here on the plugins tab right so this is kind of their more official integration and then skills are like what you create and these are just again all of these skills are mostly just like a folder that is stored somewhere in here and then there's a skill.md file in that folder that has specific instructions and AI is really good at creating skills so all you have to do is just say hey any repetitive task that you have in codex say hey I want to create a skill so we can do this faster next time and then the AI will be like okay cool like it may ask you some follow-up questions and then it'll just create the skill and then it'll show up here. Yeah one thing you might want to do is you know if you're downloading codex for the first time maybe you connect it's your google calendar and you basically say like here's what I do on a given week and you know help me create a set of skills I can help me do my job better. Absolutely yeah I think I think one of the best ways to do it is just to like literally speak into your phone I just I tell everyone to do this just yap about everything that you do on a day-to-day basis like go through every task don't skip any details take 20 minutes to just speak about everything get it in a document and then just look at it be like okay what parts could I automate with something anytime there's an automatable process and you can convert it into instructions that could be completed on a computer that is a skill that you could create on codex one really cool thing is right so we just created this report using my YouTube researcher skill and it looked at the startup ideas podcast negative only content report and cheer slowly goes down my cheek I love this let's let's all right the show is drifting away from saying I I meant to do it as a joke I'm not actually trying to nitpick your channel the comment section but I will say that as uncomfortable as it is to get AI to critique you it is a useful activity I've done it before you know like sometimes you can't turn a blind eye you know and it can an AI will actually find um it can search other channels and see what they're doing right and then compare it to what you're doing wrong it's like this channel is doing this right that's why they're getting more views than you right and these exercises are good it puts you should spend more time on what you're doing wrong than what you're doing right in my opinion and just focus on improving it every time now let's say that this was the most useful report you've ever seen right let's say we go through it and we're like oh my god like we need to we need to do this more often one thing you can do is you'll notice here we have this automation tab I want you to do this every single Friday um actually every yeah let's do every single Friday for the videos of that week I want to know what I'm doing wrong uh please create an automation oops I don't know why I didn't pick up on that oh it's because I have my AirPods in um um create automation uh 9am on Fridays and so it really is that easy to create an automation you just type in that you want this to happen this is how I normally set up automations people sometimes want to create an automation before they do it so like do it once and then tell the agent to do that every time on this day and that's a kind of a good workflow and you can see here that it shows created weekly startup ideas podcast Fridays at 9am if you click on it it opens up right here and it shows you the status which is active which is good the next run is on May 1st 2026 the last run is nothing because it hasn't run before um and there you go it tells you what project and then you'll notice here there's now a two on automations and it shows up right here and if you want to test it all you have to do is come up here and hit run now and it will run that automation and that's how you can kind of test to see how good it is and then if you notice that something's wrong you can press edit and you can edit the automation and I recommend doing that a few times like whenever you're setting up an automation you want to make sure it works and that's how you set up these recurring tasks and some recurring tasks that I'm seeing a lot of people have in the AI space or just people in business is they just have AI analyze their slack and their email like twice a day and it sends them an email summary so they just they get it very concise and they all have links to to relevant chats or emails so it's really easy to navigate I found that to be a really useful one for me as well and you know you one shot at that negative report so if I let's say I'm not happy with the output for whatever reason to refine that how do I do that yeah I mean say like hey by the way the report you gave me was too long I want more concise put and make it a slash and by the way this document is a skill by default that that is called word docs so I just say make it a word docs instead of markdown and then and then you can see I'll use the doc skill here I'll do two things convert the markdown into concise docs and update the Friday automation you see I was going to have it recreate the doc and then I would say okay now update the automation but it decided that it was just going to do it for me which is cool which is actually not how I would want to do it and one thing is in skills you can always include references with skills so or in in your automation so you could actually include the document that it creates inside the automation you can say hey it should look like this document right and you can give it an example I always tell people that really good instructions are good but giving it a really good example is great right you give an AI one good example it's amazing you give it five good good examples it's just going to do a great job every time that's kind of how I think about it so is there the concept of an eval on output meaning you know an eval basically you know evaluation short for short for evaluation basically this is a 9 on 10 output 10 on 10 output and it keeps going until it gets good output is there that concept within codex I mean you could set it up yourself the the you know this is GPT 5.5 it'll run for as long as you want it to run and so you could just tell it say like hey I want you to evaluate it the problem is I think in that case it would probably be useful to have examples of really good outputs so it knows what you want you know the AI they struggle with these subjective tasks right coding is very you know what a good output is because the app looks good and it fully works so it's easy to verify whether it's good or not but a report you know my my startup ideas podcast so this is another problem that codex has oops that's kind of annoying is like the bullets are all weird like so this is one thing this is another example of something you can fix like fix the bullets they're weird formatting um what was I saying before the weird formatting before the bullets completely threw you off you're saying those bullets are I don't forget those bullets the bullets will throw anyone off yeah uh yeah honestly but yeah you can just create these these uh I don't remember what I was saying you were saying I don't I don't remember the bullets really took us for a left turn we're talking about skill I think you're talking about the you know the right outputs examples yeah yeah yeah yeah collect the number one thing that you can do uh in a company right now and what we're talking to a lot of companies are trying to implement AI is just collect as many good examples as possible um this allows your agents to have examples that they can reference store them in a knowledge base that's easy to to find right if you store them in in like a notion database for example AI is really good at going to a notion database scouring the notion database finding the right document to use as the example and in that way you can just kind of give it all of your documents as long as you keep it organized it's it's going to be able to use it pretty well um and so collecting examples is a really useful thing and I've noticed a lot more companies are even recording their screen a lot more um in order to capture workflows because I've heard rumors that the future versions of open AI uh their new their newest model and version of codex you're going to be able to upload videos to it and so it can watch the video see exactly how you do it and then it will be able to control the computer just like you and that's going to be a whole new world and so I'm kind of preparing for that world because most of my workflows as a creator or like I'm in I'm in marketing a lot of my workflows require using an interface or using a tool like cap cut like canva and AI will pretty soon get to a point where I can do that and and just a side note you know if that's the case that you know these super apps are going to allow recorded videos to be uploaded to them um you got to think that the value of recorded content is going to go up in in the AIH so just from a startup idea perspective uh there's a lot there yeah I mean and why do you think you hear rumors of meta and Microsoft employees now required to record their screen and do certain tasks and it's kind of like you know it's become a meme in the you know a lot of people who are anti AI where like oh when they start recording your screen like it's over like they're trying to replace you your workflows and yeah it is kind of scary in a corporate setting but like if you run a small business and you want to accomplish more with like a small group of people like you want to be able to offer some tasks that you wouldn't normally do um to an AI that can just kind of handle these tasks you see here did it fix it there you go so yeah you can create any sort of document in here um recording your screen will be big so the number for negative if you go back to that dock one of the things that I get wrong in this podcast apparently according to codex is my interviews are way too soft so it says my guests get a friendly runway there's not enough pressure on failure modes cost security turns customer acquisition who should not use the product so I'd like to take this opportunity to take the Canadian out of me and not be so friendly and ask you the question with respect to codex um you know who should use the product cost securities churn customer acquisition like you know what are the hard questions I'm not asking that I should be asking about codex you know what I respect about you is you got feedback and you are applying that feedback 10 seconds later which I admire that's great um um you know who should use the product um I think that if you're constantly I think content creators should use this platform you know like I'm a content creator first that's how my brain thinks you know I'm constantly creating lead magnets uh which require vibe coding and if um and yeah I find that to be super useful and I'm also creating documents so if you're creating websites and documents you might as well do it in the same platform because ultimately like the websites that I create have to do with the documents that I create I don't want them to be in separate platforms I want to be able to create a document do research outline my thinking and then convert it into a landing page seamlessly and that's what you can do inside codex so so as much as I want to help you give good feedback I think there's a reason why uh these companies are racing to create the super app is because they think that everyone in knowledge work will use these platforms and I truly believe that that's where we're going I'm not saying you need to use codex I have no vested interest in codex I'm not an investor in open AI I've never been paid by them I just like their platform and I think it's the best right now and I see a clear path to it being the best over time so that's why I'm trying to prepare now because it's it's only 10% as good as it will be maybe once these AI gets really good at controlling a browser that's what I'm really excited about so for all those reasons you should use it but again don't use it if you don't want to anything else on this platform that's just a must know in terms of getting the most out of it honestly you know what I I maybe should have started this but so yesterday in my video I posted this video I wanted to test browser use and so I had it make this chess game and then I said I said okay use at browser use and play yourself in chess one move at a time like earlier so what you're going to see here hopefully if codex operates properly and by the way we're using 5.5 on medium intelligence which I will talk about that right after but let's see if this AI plays itself using the browser and I think this is just like a good way to kind of get an idea of like how the browser use works I recommend just having fun with it at first I think people try to do like re oh see you can see the mouse you see that so it's literally playing itself in chess as both teams and look at how fast that's like working right like you know a few months ago this was way slower than this I don't know if you tested any of the browser use stuff but this is like pretty seamlessly playing yeah it felt like like with man as for example it was really cool that browser use was even possible but it really felt like it was on a dial out modem and this this feels like it's broadband 100% yeah I just checkmated black so white just checkmated black white wins by checkmate I played it through the in app browser one move at a time alternating white and black final result white wins by checkmate and here we can see the full sequence and so in my video it did this in one prompt I said build a chess game then use browser use to test the game and play yourself until one team wins and that's what it did in one shot which I mean that's pretty insane you know like we're desensitized to it now but like that's insane if you if you think about where we were even a year ago um and then you think about where we will be a year from now you know um it may just create its own canva a year from now and then use that it might find might be like oh it would be way faster for me to just create my own tool because canva doesn't have this little feature and it can't add it like it might as well just make its own feature and then add it and then control it and that so are you not using cloud code at all anymore this is like your daily driver okay two things I forgot to cover that's one of them command j opens the terminal type quad I have it set up so automatically running uh dangerously skip permissions mode anytime like I can say redesign the chess app to make it the anthropic vibe boom congratulations you're using cloud code inside codex and you're using it with the cloud subscription so you are getting your benefiting from that same the same savings right and another reason why you want to use these models in these platforms directly like in cloud or in codex is you just save so much money because they're subsidizing like you get thousands of dollars of tokens for your 100 dollar per month or 200 dollar per month plan um because you're using their platforms so like for me there's no really good argument on not using these platforms if i'm being honest because you get so many tokens uh as a as a user and you can also just use cloud code directly inside codex and it'll work um so that's one thing also another thing is uh you know Theo and some other people have been talking about how they like to use 5.5 on low and medium effort for most tasks right if you ask it to make a simple change and you use extra high it'll often like really try and put a ton of effort into it and it might go off and like do unintended things and so that's one thing to look out for i'm not very good at discipline enough at doing that i end up using i end up just on extra high just running it over and over again um but that's what i've been hearing other people say and you can also if it feels like it's going too slow you can turn it to fast just know that this will be um more expensive you'll run out of credits faster i also think it's worth mentioning that 5.5 is an expensive model right yes it's if you use it via their api um let's see here look at that so cloud code just changed the chessboard right and then you can just throw it away the only thing is if you use if you use codex in the app you get that like spinny animation and you can see when it's done that does not happen when you use it in the browser they're kind of like separate things so just keep that in mind but like look at how easy that was now people like oh but clouds way better at design so it's like just make the whole app and then tell cloud to design it like that's what i say it's like it's that easy um what did you just ask right before this um i just i was just saying that i you know you should should be noted that 5.5 is a more expensive oh yes yeah if you use it via the api it's twice as expensive as uh the recent model which is uh gbt 5.4 it's twice as expensive but what you'll find is that the model is actually more efficient so it'll get the job done and get the job done better with less tokens and i think that's where i think the benchmark thing will be a year from now it's not going to be how token efficient is it it's going to be how much money and how much time does it cost to do a specific task you know the same way you would hire a contractor or a human employee you're not like you don't think about it in terms of token efficiency you're like you know you just think about how expensive is it to get a task done and so like if you were what this model does is it really thinks about your intent more and so it'll go more directly towards what it is that you want and so you may find that it actually gets things done better and faster um but yeah i definitely can cost more money when using it on the api i haven't noticed my credits going down twice as much when using it in the app so that's hard to say um and then it's also 20% more expensive than opus 4.7 so that's one thing to consider so it is pretty expensive you said that there were two things that you wanted to cover one was terminal one was the models and the second was using cloud code in the terminal and again this is a full terminal so if you're technical like you can do anything in here um and i think yeah i mean you can create any type of document i'm still learning this right now so for for example you can leave comments on the uh on the browser this is similar to cursor has this feature as well so you can just comment directly on this and say like this should say uh gray chess chess and what you'll see once you press enter you see that one annotation enters the the chat let me close out of this um and you can say and then you can add another one you can say like uh the pieces should be bigger and you can just say bigger and so you can add three annotations and then just say make these changes that's kind of how i do it uh for a lot of the design changes and it's super useful um and so yeah i mean this is a very complete product you can also full screen it one thing that you can do is you can full screen and then you can kind of message it here it's kind of in a more immersive way to uh do some vibe coding tasks or if you want to just focus on the document that you're working on i find this to be incredibly useful have you been using codex a lot with images 2.0 yes 100 percent so um great question codex has gbt image 2 which is the best image model in the world and again this is not like up for debate i'm not again i'm really not trying to shill anything you notice here that it's making changes and it's using browser use to test stuff i didn't even ask for that so just wanted to put that out there um yeah the gbt image model is actually insane it's better across every single category and it's built into codex and so you can ask it to create websites you can ask it to create 10 different versions of thumbnails and codex will just prompt gbt image 2 and then it can generate um images and then it can put those images in in a word doc you can put them in a presentation or a website or anything so yeah it's a super useful feature and i think there might be a skill for it um it's slash image or gbt no okay you can just ask it to use gbt image and it'll just do it and they also have Sora built in too like Sora is an official plug-in and i believe you can use Sora no yeah no god no i don't even have it installed i just you know some people out there you know they might want to create some brain rot videos or whatever they're doing yeah i think the people that listen to this like most people here are like i want to start a company where i have a company and i want product market fit and i want to scale it and they're looking at how can i use this tool to just supercharge my productivity and so i think that with respect to Sora you know soras now do you listen from the app store right yeah it's it doesn't exist anymore doesn't exist anymore so it's like it's interesting it's fun but i think the people listening to this are way more interested in using emotion totally but but remind you that's not like a reference to the app the the plug-in it's it's the video model and soras not the best video model right now so that's why it's not interesting and i think that's what opening i realized i like oh it's gonna take so much effort to create the best state of the art video model like that's what people want to use so you can create a skill that connects to fa to use the best video models and you can attach it to this app and you could have those videos show up inside the emotion thing you can put videos inside of the emotion video that play in the video itself so if you wanted to create a talking head video of you i've seen you've you've have used AI video before i'm certain you could easily sent that workflow to work directly inside codex and you could add some titles directly in it i'm sure there's going to be a company that only builds like an AI video editor like remotion that shows up inside codex and they're going to make a killing right um that's all coming and so you'll be able to just edit create videos directly inside codex because any interface that you can possibly think of that would be on the internet will show up here because it's a full web browser so and with uh you know working with fa i'll you know what is the best video models at cdance 2.0 is there something else that you you you for whatever reason i've like completely lost interest in AI videos maybe it's gotten so good for me i just focused so much more on like the kai fine coding and and agents so much more interesting than video models i'm not up to date i would love in the comments if someone could let us know what the current state of the art model is i'm i'm really curious uh i've heard cdance clang and a few others are are really good um i'm curious where google is have you heard anything about vio like is is that still a good model or is it 3 was that the latest one i think it was the latest maybe like 3.1 or something yeah i mean i had pj asan i don't know three four months ago and the stuff that he was able to show me in terms of creating commercials using vio 3.0 i believe was incredible um haven't heard of it a big launch from google since then um but i i i loved i loved what i loved what he showed me i also played with cdance two last week um and i was also like very very impressed yeah i always try it and i'm like this is awesome and then i'm like what am i going to use this for like for me i make educational content i like talking i you know it's it's hard for me and i've just been using remotion a lot because um very similar to you in the first you know one to two minutes of my long form videos i use graphics to kind of outline the you know i saw are watched one of your open claw videos recently and you have a really cool graphic of like open claw with a spotlight coming down on the open claw is just a very good opening graphic and that's how i use i use it as as overlays over my long form content that's what i'm excited about i just have you in using it not at all for for a i generated video but also pj is a legend by the way i love it absolutely legend i think a part of what's what's daunting for a lot of people in ai in general is they hear about something like codex and they're overwhelmed with how do i actually make this a part of my life i just had coffee right before this with a friend of mine and i was like due to you on you know codex how you using clawed how you using jeman i and he was just like to be honest i use notion and notion ai and like i ping pong with you know chat gbt and jeman i sometimes but that's like basically it and i was like well what's stopping you from setting up some automations and creating some skills and this and that he's like i'm just overwhelmed and i don't know yeah i mean notion first of all notions is a great job honestly i you know i think they're i don't use notion much anymore because the platform got a little too overwhelming to onboard other people onto like if you don't know how to use notion it's becoming a little annoying to like teach people how to use notion it's kind of overwhelming a little bit but they have a really good agent sales system built in and if you want to go deep in notion ai and learning how to build agents do it like you know it's great i just personally want to create other types of documents and um i find codex like very soon you'll be able to connect like notion will just show up in the browser um because right now you can't sign in to anything and have it stay signed in it's not persistent uh so that's but i know for a fact that they're releasing a full browser and so there is a notion skill already you'll be able to control and so you're going to be able to use these models for cheaper inside codex to use ai inside notion to me it doesn't make much sense to use the agents within notion make sense to use the agents within codex and then use the interface of notion if you like that's how i that's how i see it but if you say you use notion as your second brain i'm i'm sure there's a plug-in a notion plug-in that connects right yeah absolutely plug-in uh notion i have it set up i use notion for one specific thing and that is for all of my videos i create one notion page and i drop in um i you can actually upload videos to it and like i can comment on parts of the script and include attachments on the videos it's a niche use case so i use notion and i set it up with one click and if you actually go to notion um actually we don't need to get into this but it's super easy to like choose what team spaces has access for codex so when you go to notion you can very easily like set up permissions like and you can only give it access to one database if you want um if you're if you're worried about it messing up messing with your notion or privacy concerns it's you can give it access to only specific databases which i find really useful i want to end on this note um i want to end on for someone who's just getting started with codex if there's three or four things that they should do once they've got to install what would those things be it's very funny and by the way we didn't plan this i put this right before the podcast i was like if there's projects to get started to test i actually wrote them down um and we covered one of them i i think the first thing that you should do is you should have fun on all these platforms i think the worst thing that people do when they when they show up on the platform is to like expect to get productivity out of it right away without kind of like play around for 30 minutes take an hour to just do fun projects and that this gives you an idea of like the possibilities and then hone it down and get very specific and get discipline and so i think one of the best things that you can do is like make a game uh and have browser use play a game against itself just use a browser use test it it'll get your brain thinking about where this is going in the future and how this will be useful in the future which may actually change how you set up your documentation now for all of your different tasks like maybe it'll maybe you can start preparing for it now because this is not a year from now this is like three months away a i will be able to control any browser like as good of a human and this is something i can't convey like explaining it you have to try it out so that's why i recommend trying it out another thing that you should do is um tell a i to do in-depth research and say i put it on max effort and say i want you to research this topic and um put it all organize all of the information you find into a spreadsheet then when you're done turn that into a document and a presentation and just get the sense that you can create a in-depth research report you can put it in a spreadsheet you can create a document and a presentation right so once you do these two things you now understand browser use in all the types of documents it can create and then i said make a 3d simulation this one's more just for fun um if you want to you can also try and build a mobile app and swift if you have a company website and you're like oh you've always wanted to create a mobile app um you can literally download the code to your to your web app or website upload it and say hey i want you to build a mobile app in swift for this for now you still need to have a mac and you need to have an xcode downloaded but it can one-shot mobile apps like full mobile apps uh if there's a few things that you need to learn but you'll be mind blown at what it can create in one shot to the point where it's actually gotten scary for me like i'm like oh my god every app that can exist will exist um that's how good AI is getting it creating mobile apps and then like the main thing after you've kind of played around like i said list out all the things that you do on a day-to-day basis pick the most annoying thing that you do every day and then um try and do it with computer use or just try to create a workflow that accomplishes it maybe you use plugins and then tell your agent to turn it into an automation just tell your agent to turn it into an automation and you know if you can create one useful automation in a couple of hours that might be worth it you know um and so those are just some projects that you could get started with right now that will give you an overarching view of what this tool can do and i think by then you'll be like okay i understand and by then you'll be like that Riley Brown guy he was right about that code i think yeah like and you might have doubt now like you you can only convey so much information by talking or even showing like you got a feet with AI i think to a large degree you have to feel it you do these things if you're still not sold message me i i i i i don't think you you'll exist um i i don't think that personal exist just i'll include all include links for where to find Riley in the show notes in the description Riley put my phone number i want to direct line now i'll include Riley's phone number actually be careful what you text Riley because he's got a chronicle setup so you know whatever you text him like to show up on the internet it goes it goes straight to Sam Altman yeah Riley thanks so much for coming on the show um do you have one last words word of wisdom to leave people after this codex master class um honestly just get out there and experiment right now is the best time to experiment and uh what i've noticed you know i'm being in San Francisco i've noticed that the people who have been like really successful creating startups are people who just like want to experiment and tinker and they don't have so many people who are like type A want to get an immediate benefit after 30 minutes of using a tool and i don't think that's where the benefits come i think the benefits come from tinkering messing around with tools and and when you get when you have this weird inclination and you're like okay wait what is a model why is this model different than the deep seek v4 model it's like go down that rabbit hole use AI learn about it and then through that process you'll you'll learn the things you need to learn to like start or grow your business i think all of the magic in AI happens in these like rabbit holes and then once you find something just like go all in on it that's that's kind of my my final advice and i think codex is a great kind of surface to do it on you're totally right by the way i lived in San Francisco for you know almost nine years and i think it's not just so much that the tinkers win is that people the tinkers who aren't afraid of looking dumb win right so i think when you're when you're trying some of these tools you might feel dumb initially and it's because you aren't a master of it yet but the only way to become a master is to actually put in the time and work so i think the the reward is infinite right the ability to use these tools really well like codex and be able to create you know for me this isn't just a tool that's helpful for content creators like this is helpful for literally anything that you know you can dream of lead magnets you use one example lead magnets content of course but you know ideas for products that you want to create businesses you want to create automating your personal life automating a dream team for you know a business that you're starting just you know and everything in between so yeah keep keep playing just stop listening to this but you know also liking comment for for us that you know i want to i want this episode to get a lot of love so variety comes back on um but yeah get your hands come on dude this is my fifth time on the show man i mean i'll i'll come back on anytime even if it gets 10 views you came you came on when we're just a little show and dude you honestly there's an argument to be made that i put you on the map now i'm just playing uh the the video the first vibe coding video it's funny i actually someone a lot of people bring that up they're like oh i first saw you on Greg Eisenberg's podcast when i was struggling through that first episode and that's why we that's why we do this right like you know i hope i hope uh so yeah thanks again for coming on i hope someone learned one two three four five things that just gave them not just the creative juices to to actually use these tools but the motivation to keep going so thanks a lot Riley appreciate you having me on this is awesome