Ep 776: OpenAI’s Codex For Beginners: Why it’s better than Claude, ChatGPT and How to Start Using It

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creative AI studio. Just describe what you want to create and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere, Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome. The assistant accelerates execution. Here's a little secret. I don't use ChatGPT much anymore. And I don't think you should either. And that's not because it's not a good AI chatbot or AI operating system. It's still one of the best. But the reason I don't really use ChatGPT much anymore is actually because of OpenAI's Codex desktop app. That's OpenAI's developer tool turned knowledge worker agent. And the simplest way to frame it is ChatGPT works with you, Codex works for you. It can use your computer without interrupting you. It can control your Chrome browser, and it even has a built-in file viewer and a built-in browser. Yes, OpenAI has also confirmed that Codex is actually their forthcoming super app. So if you want to stay on the cutting edge of what's available in AI, that's actually happening in Codex and not necessarily ChatGPT. But maybe you've been scared off just by the word code in Codex or by its developer-only origins. If that's you, or if you're still not sure if you're really using Codex correctly, or if you want to jump in, but if you're not sure how it all works, then today's show is definitely for you. We're going over Codex for beginners. Why it's better than Claude Code, Claude Cowork, and even ChatGPT, and how you can actually start using it today, even if you're a non-technical person. All right, I'm excited to jump into it. First, here's the big picture. You are not using the most powerful AI system in the world. That is Codex. It's not ChatGPT, it's not Claude on the web, it's not Claude Desktop via Cowork or Claude Code. It is Codex, and it is not even close. So here's the zoomed out version. OpenAI released Codex for the web about a year ago, but then they released the desktop app version in February. And since then, it has gotten widespread adoption. And I think even though I've been screaming about it on the porch since February, right? Like old man Jordan on the porch saying, use Codex, kids. I think finally the rest of the world is finally starting to wake up now to what I've been saying for 3 months. You can't ignore Codex. Anymore. And yes, Anthropic did beat OpenAI to the punch when it came to desktop versions of their most popular tools, specifically in Claude Code and Claude Cowork. And they were great in their own right, but I don't really use Claude Code or Claude Cowork much anymore because I don't really find a use case. And I look for them all the time. And I think OpenAI has really leaned into Codex, right, the future super app, so heavily that Codex is now measured better than both ChatGPT and Claude's desktop offering. So on today's show, on Wednesdays, we put AI to work. I have— on Wednesdays, we're doing a nice little live demo. What could go wrong? All right. So we're gonna go over the basics of how Codex works and how any free or paid ChatGPT user can try it today. Yeah, you can even be on a free plan and try this. I'm gonna give you 35 fast Codex facts that will get you from 0 to 5 hopefully in no time. And I'm gonna show you how I'm personally using ChatGPT versus Codex and the secret reason your company should probably be using Codex and not using any cloud desktop app. It's one very simple thing that has huge ramifications that most people are shocked when they find out. All right, let's get into it. Welcome to Everyday AI. My name's Jordan Wilson, and if you are new here, well, we do this every day. It's a daily unedited livestream podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday business leaders like you and me keep up with what's happening in the world of AI, 'cause it doesn't stop. I tell you what's important, how to use it to grow your company and your career. So it starts here, but make sure if you wanna be the smartest person in AI, our website is your cheat code, youreverydayai.com. You can obviously go listen and watch to every single episode we've ever done for free there if you go click on the episodes tab. But you can also go sign up for our free daily newsletter where we will be recapping the highlights from today's show as well as all of the other AI news that you need to know. All right. Also, yeah, there's so much here. Uh, we're actually going to do a two-parter. So we're going to do part one today and we're going to do part two, uh, probably next Wednesday, as long as there's not some, you know, huge other release, in which case we'll push out part two for another week. But this is two parts because it would take me many hours. Uh, but I'm going to try to make this one kind of fast. Basic, but also show you what's possible. So in part 2, we're going to cover skills, plugins, and automations. We're going to go over the basics of computer use, Chrome control, and connecting your data. I'm going to show you what Goal is, right? Yeah, that's big, right? The new Goal feature inside Codex and why you should be using it. And then I'm going to show you the right way to set up standard and advanced workflows that run on a schedule and are light years ahead of what you could actually do inside of Claude, uh, Cowork, or Claude Code. All right. Woo. That's a lot. Livestream audience, good to see you. Joe says, I live in Codex these days. Amico, thanks for joining from Tokyo. Gabriella joining from Canada. Jose from Santiago. Someone here from Los Angeles. All right. So thanks for tuning in. If you do have any questions, I don't always do the, you know, live audience stuff as much anymore. It might be a little confusing for our podcast, uh, people, but if you are listening on the podcast, FYI, we always will have a video version of this on our website at youreverydayai.com. Because we are gonna be doing a demo. Yes, there are gonna be some visual things. I'm gonna try my best to describe everything so you don't need to watch the video. But if you do, uh, make sure you go check that out. And for our livestream audience, if you do have, uh, any questions as we go along, please make sure to let me know and I'll try to tackle them. As we go or at the end. One other thing to keep a note, we are gonna be doing some sort of, I've changed the name, uh, still kind of shooting for a quarter 2 launch of this. So a Cowork Codex cohort, that's a mouthful, right? Uh, so if you do want access to that, make sure to repost today's show on LinkedIn. So if you are listening on the podcast, check your show notes and we always have a link to today's show that we put on LinkedIn. So go repost that and I will give you more information and give you priority access when we finally do launch that Cowork Codex cohort. All right, that was a lot. So let me get into the facts here. I think there's been this recent shift, um, you know, probably in Q1, Q2, toward everyone running toward, uh, Claude, specifically for Claude Code and for Claude Cowork. And although I would have definitely agreed with you in December, right, when Claude Code came out on the desktop, or I think that was, uh, sometime in Q4, uh, and in January, right, uh, the combination of Claude Code and Claude Cowork was unmatched in what it could then do on the desktop and, uh, kind of what that meant for knowledge workers everywhere. But since February, since OpenAI launched a Codex Mac app, I've been using Cloud on the desktop less and less, right? I was using it very heavily for a long time, but it's gotten to the point where probably this week I've stopped using Cloud Code. And I probably think that you should too, and your company should too, unless something drastically changes. All right, now I want to go over 3 main reasons for that before we go into the live demo and all that. But, all right, number 1, and, uh, livestream audience, let me know if you can see my screen. I'm going to be jumping around a lot. Lot today. So please let me know. Let me make my face a little bit smaller there. See if we can make my desktop a little bit bigger. All right. So reason number 1, it's the best model. All right. And there is actually some confusion on this because there's different variants of GPT-5.5. All right. And one of the biggest points of confusion is Arena. So if you look at Arena, right, you'll see that GPT-5.5 is actually not doing that well overall. It's the number 8 model, right? So for the blind taste test, it's not doing well, but you'll see the version that's tested on Arena is GPT-5.5-High. If you go to Artificial Analysis, which I always say there's 3 things you should pay attention to. One is Arena, two is Artificial Analysis, which is kind of like a conglomerate of all these different benchmarks. And then the benchmark GDP-VAL, which is a model's ability front to back to create economically valuable work. So those 3 things we could talk about. But one thing that's important to know is in Arena, they are just using the high version of GPT-5.5. If you look on Artificial Analysis, they test the extra high or the best version available. And if you look, it is in a league of its own. It is light years better. Yes, 3 points on this, uh, is light years better. Trust me. All right, because you have Claude 4.7, Claude Opus 4.7, Gemini 1.3, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and the old version, GPT-5.4 Extra High. They're all tied at 57, right? So there was a logjam for a very long time. Now GPT-5.5 High has a 60 on artificial analysis. So reason number 1, well, GPT-5.5 High is so good. I was actually talking about this with someone yesterday. You know, similarly, GPT-5.5 Pro on the web. It's in another league, right? If you need something done correctly, use the highest version of GPT-5.5. Or if you have, you know, Gemini DeepThink, similarly, it's a whole nother tier. But in terms of Opus 4.7 with adaptive thinking, which I personally hate the new adaptive thinking on Claude, right? When I want it to think, even I tell it to think, and you have adaptive thinking on, and then it decides not to think. All right. So anyways, Reason number 1, 5.5 extra high is untouchable. All right. Uh, reason number 2 that you should be using Codex much more is, well, Codex's uptime is impeccable, and that's extremely important. All right. So, uh, showing here on my screen something I, I, I posted, um, to Twitter and our Inner Circle community a couple of weeks ago is this uptime. These are from the actual companies themselves. The gold standard, uh, you know, and think about when using this in the enterprise, and this makes sense when you understand how autonomous these systems are becoming, right? So as an example, Claude has some great features, you know, scheduled tasks inside Claude Code Work, uh, routines in Claude Code that you can schedule around the clock. Sounds great and all until what if you have a series of those things going on? Let's just say you have a series of 3 actions or a series of 3 routines that depend on each other. And if number 1 doesn't trigger, number 2 and number 3, if they are dependent on each other, all of a sudden become useless, right? So kind of the gold standard in enterprise software is either 3 nines or 4 nines. What that means is we're talking about uptime. So that's either 99.9% or 99.99%. All right. Codex has a 100% uptime. which is absolutely bonkers, right? OpenAI's APIs has 4 nines, 99.99, uh, and then, uh, ChatGPT has 99.8. All right, ready? Ready for this? Look at Claude Code, 99.2. Not 99.8, not 99.9, 99.2. Claude's API, 99.0. All right. And then Claude.ai, so Claude of the web, 98.7. All right. If I'm running an enterprise, I'm not even considering Claude for that one very reason. The uptime can end up honestly costing your company millions of dollars if you lean heavily into, you know, all of the latest and greatest features from Anthropic. Claude is scheduled, tasks inside Cowork, Claude routines, all of these things. I, I, I've tried them, I've done them, and I have all of these dependencies, and it got to the point where it is straight up unusable. Because even at a 98.7% or a 99.2% uptime, that is legitimately a recipe for disaster for your company. You need to be as close to that three nines as possible. And that's one reason Codex and OpenAI's APIs, uh, I think are still and will continue to be the bedrock for serious companies that want to do work online. You can't be playing essentially with kids' tools if you're doing real work. All right. And then, uh, number 3, Claude doesn't actually have memory. Codex does. This is that one secret thing that most people don't know about that when I show people, they're like, wait, are you serious? This doesn't make any sense. All right. So, uh, apologies in advance, 'cause I'm gonna have to do some, some bouncing around here. All right. So you might be thinking, of course Claude has memory. right? So I'm gonna go into Claude here. I'm going into my, my settings. All right, let me bounce around here. Sorry, livestream audience. There's gonna be a lot going on on the screen on today's, on today's show. So let me try to make this easy to follow along. All right, so as an example, if I go into my settings inside Claude on the desktop and I go to capabilities, Anthropic tells you that you can search, and this is on the desktop version, right? So I'm using the desktop version of Claude and the desktop version of Codex here, and I'm going side by side. And this one reason alone should, should be more than, more than what you need, right? Watch, this is gonna be the time it doesn't work when I do it live. All right, but you'll see inside, uh, inside Claude, I have the memory options toggled on. So it says search and reference chats. And then it also says generate memory from chat history. All right, let's try that out, right? There's a common, uh, a thing I learned in journalism school that says if your mom says she loves you, get it in writing. So never take a setting as truth. All right, so I'm gonna tell both, uh, Claude Desktop, uh, so I'm using Cowork here, but I tried it across the board, um, that my favorite NFL team is the Chicago Bears. All right, so I'm just going to do the same thing here in Claude Cowork and in Codex. All right, simple enough. I'm going to go now to new task, and here's why. So aside from the fact that Claude Code technically has 3 silos, which stinks, right? There's Claude Chat, there's Claude Cowork, and there's Claude Code. Um, those 3 are siloed. They have no clue what's going on, but Unless you test everything out like I do, you have no clue that Claude isn't actually telling the truth when there's that toggle inside of their settings that says it has chat history. Don't believe me? Let's find out. So I'm opening a new, uh, tab in each. All right, watch, it's gonna work this time. So I'm saying, and I'm even telling it using chat history and memory, what is my favorite NFL team? So in chat number 1, all right. I said it's the Chicago Bears. All right, so let me go here. Same thing in Codex. All right, new chat saying, using chat history and memory, what is my favorite NFL team? All right, so here you'll see Claude said something funny here. I don't have access to any prior chat history or memory files in this session that would tell me Your favorite NFL team. Nothing about a favorite team is currently visible to me. That's really interesting, Anthropic, because you have this listed as a capability in your desktop app. All right. I'm not showing you a setting from the web. All right. It says you can search and reference chats and generate memory from chat history. So that alone, think of the work that your company does, and so many people from using all of these versions on the web for the last year. Let me just say this. Claude's memory on the web is really, really good. So is ChatGPT's, but Claude's memory on the web, I love it. It's great. This is a huge potential pitfall for your company, or if you're a solopreneur, small business, you know, using Claude across your teams and wanna move to the desktop. This is a, let me just call it what it is. It is a trap. Right? Because we've had this big shift, uh, in 2026, going away from prompt engineering to context engineering, and everything is about, you know, kind of persistent memory and being able to use all of this information. But right here, before we even get started, before we even get started, I just showed you why you probably shouldn't be using Claude for anything. Right? And here's the result from Codex. All right. So it said your favorite NFL team is the Chicago Bears. Verified from your local Codex chat history. So not only do you have a huge disadvantage inside Claude, the fact that it has 3 different silos, chat doesn't know what Cowork's doing, Cowork doesn't know what Claude's doing, Claude or Code's doing, Code doesn't know what's chat doing, but also even within Codex, Codex doesn't know what it's doing within its own environment. Inside Codex, you have one thing. That's it. There's no three silos. And even within that one element, it actually knows what's going on. So when we talk about who's winning the enterprise, let me just, all right, this, I didn't mean to turn this into a hot take, but this is just one of those things that people are so ill-informed. Again, what business leader would look at this and say, yeah, this, you know, Claude Desktop sounds like it's for me. Just saying, I don't know if you wanna fail, if you wanna get left behind, you can do that. Yeah, there's fun things. I still use Claude Desktop for a lot of stuff, but when it comes to my serious day-to-day work, it's all happening within Codex. All right. Yeah. Someone here from YouTube saying, that's insane. Had no idea Claude didn't have memory. Uh, yeah. Uh, Jackie, memory worked for me with Claude Desktop, so it is only Cowork. It, yeah, please, please show me. I, I've yet to see it work on desktop. I've tried it across team and enterprise applications, but yeah, just did a live demo there. Doesn't work even within chat. I don't think they did just have an update. I could try it in chat one more time, but I tried it yesterday. None of it worked. So unless it's pulling, here's the caveat, if it's pulling from your documents, from your Gmail, etc., chat will pull things from there. But in terms of if you get something in a chat, the context, whatever, it doesn't know. All right. I spent too long on that. I accidentally went on a little, uh, side tangent. But, uh, let me quickly tell you though, the 3 reasons why I still use ChatGPT for some things. All right. Because inside Codex, we're going to show, uh, you still get access to all the models. You get the ImageGen, you get the connectors, you get most of what you get inside of ChatGPT. But there are a couple of things I still use ChatGPT for. Number 1 is Workspace Agents. All right, so those are great across your team. And even though those agents are built on Codex, I know this is a little confusing, you don't have the same abilities inside Codex to run Workspace Agents. And one of the biggest things is to be able to run them when Codex is not running, right? So yes, you have all of these automations and scheduled automations that we'll go over in part 2, but Codex does have to be open in order for those to run. So I still have kind of like backup or redundancy tendencies that I use inside, uh, ChatGPT inside my business account, uh, for workspace agents because you don't need to be quote unquote connected for those. Number 2, deep research. Uh, as far as I know, uh, I haven't looked at the skills this morning. I looked at everything yesterday as I was finishing up planning. Uh, but there's no deep research inside Codex now. I'm sure it's something they're gonna bring over. And then the 3rd thing that I'm using still ChatGPT for is canvas mode for quick mockups. Yes, Codex can actually build amazing things, but I just love the canvas mode. Maybe that's more of a habit. Right. But I love Gemini's canvas. I love ChatGPT's canvas. I love Claude artifacts. So that's one of the reasons why I'm still using ChatGPT. All right. Let's look live. Actually, before we do, I need a coffee break, y'all. Let's, let's take a second for a quick word from our partners. 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You stay in the driver's seat as the creative director. Adobe Firefly AI Assistant, now in public beta. See it today at firefly.adobe.com. All right, let's get back to it. We're gonna first do a very quick hands-on overview of everything, um, Codex desktop app. So, uh, to start with, you get this on a free plan. Uh, it's very limited on the free plan, but if you're on the $20 ChatGPT, uh, account, you have Codex. A lot of people don't understand. They think Codex is a separate subscription. It's not. Alright, so you are going to download this. This is a down— this is an app that runs on your desktop. Let me just go ahead and close Claude Code here so it's not, uh, taking up any, any space on my computer. Uh, so there is a Windows version and a Mac version. Uh, there are some certain feature differences a little bit, but nothing too much. Alright, so you are going to download, um, Codex. You're gonna install it. Uh, for certain things, you're gonna have to give it permissions. Uh, the real cool thing is there's a nice onboarding flow. Where it shows you for things like computer use, you're gonna have to go into your accessibility settings on a Mac, et cetera, granted access, all that good stuff. All right, so, uh, then you're gonna log in to your, uh, you, you log into Codex via your ChatGPT login. Uh, so one other thing, if you go into, uh, general settings here, all right, there's different setups and there's a new onboarding flow, which I really like that OpenAI released a couple of weeks ago where it is essentially built around different personas, right? So, uh, OpenAI is leaning more heavily into, uh, kind of shedding the old persona that Codex is a developer tool and it's for anyone. And you'll even see that in settings. So you can go, uh, you can have a coding setup that gives you a more technical response or control, or you can click the everyday work kind of user interface. So if you click that, it literally just looks, and for the most part functions, like ChatGPT, the old desktop app. All right. Uh, a couple other things. Uh, I'm gonna scroll through here. I'm not going through all of these settings. Uh, I did want to talk, actually, I'll get to that later. All right, let's first go over a simple overview of the desktop app. All right, so like ChatGPT, there's folders and then there's, um, normal chats that don't live inside of a folder. And that's also kind of new. So let me first tell you what a folder or a project, uh, what it's used for and how it's set up. So I'm gonna click, uh, on the left-hand side, there is a, uh, normal kind of sidebar. You can toggle it on or off. All right. So if I click new project here, all right, um, there's a couple things that you're gonna look at and be like, what are these things? So because it runs on your desktop, all right, one of the biggest benefits, but also one of the biggest potential downsides, if you don't know what you're doing, is you're granting it access to a folder. And it has read/write capabilities to your local machine. And that is the biggest— one of the biggest differentiators between using Codex on the desktop, using Codex on the web, or using ChatGPT on the web is it can literally run and control your entire computer. Right. So with great power comes great responsibility. If you are using this in a work setting, make sure you go through all the right permissions to, you know, say, hey, can I do A, B, and C with Codex? Go through all those things, but, uh, there's different access that you can have. You can have default permissions, you can have auto review, you can have full access, or you can have a custom configuration. So you can set these up on the project level and then you're going to give, uh, whoops, you're going to give, uh, Codex access, uh, to a certain file on your computer. And then I can set that up and then it will be able to read and write on its own. It'll be able to create new folders, new files, pull from information you put in there, etc. So that's the first piece of strategy there, because for the most part, you're going to want to sandbox these off, especially if you're a newer user. What that means is you're probably not going to want to sync this to like a Team Drive and give it access to an entire Team Drive when you're just trying to build something on the side, or if you're just trying to experiment how to automate your work, and then all of a sudden, whoops, it just deleted a file or folder because you told it to, but you didn't know that it was going to do that, etc. right? So I would always start by sandboxing it and creating, uh, a specific folder, right? For me, I have it in my documents folder. I have a Codex folder, and then underneath there, then I kind of have it sorted out by project. Or let's say if you wanna use Codex for something like something simple, uh, which I have a version, I have one of these going where it's just, it's my downloads folder, right? Uh, a lot of times I'm downloading a ton of local files to my computer. Um, and I want to be able to access them on the go. I wanna be able to sort them. I'm like, oh my gosh, where is that file, what can I do with it, etc. Right. So that also helps me organize my life. But I also know it could go in there if I'm not paying close attention. And this is with any autonomous agent that runs on your desktop. It can accidentally delete things, move things, rename things, etc. All right. So keep that in mind. So first, when you set up a new project, you're going to go ahead and give it access to a folder. Also GitHub. We don't have to get too technical here, but essentially, if you've never heard of GitHub, think of it as like a Google Drive. It's like a storage for your code. All right. So in a lot of these instances, even if you're not asking Codex to write code, it will still write code, right, to accomplish certain things because it not only has access to your desktop, it can access your terminal. So you can do things with, you know, third-party APIs. Essentially, it might be doing a lot of heavy lifting on your computer without you even telling it to. So you don't even have to technically know how a lot of these things work because it has access to your computer through some more advanced features. It can access, you know, your Chrome browser. There's a new Codex Chrome extension. It can access API services via the terminal, all of these more advanced things. So GitHub essentially is an option to, quote unquote, back up your code to GitHub. And you can do that in a private repo or a public repo. So you don't have to set something up to GitHub. But if you're wondering like, what does that mean? That's what it means. All right. Couple other basic things before we go through our 35 fast facts. All right. So we're not doing a full hands-on demo today. I wanna keep it simple. Couple things you need to know. Uh, you can still, uh, choose the different, um, models. So you have low, medium, high, and extra high. All right. Depending on the, on the plan, you're probably not gonna see extra high if you're on a free plan, as an example. Uh, you can choose different models. You can choose 5.4. 5.3, as well as 5 point, uh, sorry, 5.5, 5.4, uh, or 5.3. So you also have the different models and then essentially different tiers of intelligence. All right. Also, I forgot to notice that I, I should have said like 4 reasons you probably shouldn't use Claude for the most part. Limits, right? You, you, you, your rate limits on a $20, uh, ChatGPT, uh, account are much better than a $100 a month Claude, not close. On the $200 a month Claude Max plan, you know, you can pretty much use it at will. But if you're even on the $20 or $100 a month Claude plan, you're, you're in, if you're a heavy user, it's not gonna work for you. Right? Even if you're on the $20 plan on ChatGPT though, you're probably not gonna hit limits for the most part. Even if you're using extra high a lot. All right. So you choose your model. You can click the plus button, choose your different plugins. You have to connect all of these. So plugins are like apps certain capabilities. And we'll go over that more in part 2. There's a plan mode, which, well, it helps you plan. Alright? Which is great. It helps you, you know, if you're about to take on a big project, set up a big automation, it kind of asks you a series of questions to make sure you're doing it right. Then you can upload photos and— or sorry, upload photos or files. And then you can also click the backslash. So backslash is gonna give you some different commands and options that you might not know, or, you know, you don't have all of these things in ChatGPT. So as an example, there's a feedback button, MCPs, you can build MCPs to connect to any data service, Worktree, you can, you know, personality, they have these new things called pets, right? I'm not going to get too far into it, but click the backslash command, take some time looking at those things. Also click the button. The button is how you work with different plugins. So a lot of times Codex will just understand your intent really well. So if I say, as an example, you know, triage my, you know, my G— my email, my calendar, and my Drive, right? So even if I don't say Gmail for email, even if I don't say Google Calendar for calendar, and even if I don't say Google Drive for Drive, usually it will know those things. But you can still click the button, uh, when you're typing out your prompt or building different workflows. Building different automations, and you can still manually select, uh, those apps from the dropdown list that you have connected. So similarly, how you would go through and connect apps or connectors in ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or, you know, Copilot, whatever, the same thing inside of Codex. All right. So that is, um, the basics of using the actual app. And like I said, it looks very much like ChatGPT, you can go down here. There is a chat-only, section. So if you don't want something to be attached to a project, by default, there is kind of a chat section as well. So if you're like, I don't need to give this access to a bunch of, you know, folders or files on my computer, or maybe you just don't want to, right? So you just have that option down there to go over the chat. All right. Whew. That was a lot. So now let's do this. We're gonna go through as quickly as possible, 35 fast facts to help you better understand and use Codex. All right, so probably not gonna be doing FYI if you're listening on the podcast, probably not gonna be doing a ton of these things, um, on the screen here. Uh, but probably I will stop and point out a few of them. All right, so we are going, uh, rapid fire here. All right, some of these I already went through, so we'll go quick. Number 1, Codex is the new super app. All right, so there's been all this news. OpenAI is moving toward this super app. They're kind of putting, you know, Atlas and ChatGPT and Codex into one. Well, it's Codex. So if you're not using Codex now, that's the reason you should be using Codex and you should get used to it right now. Number 2, already said this, Codex is included with your ChatGPT subscription. You don't have to be paying extra. Number 3, important to know, there are, there's a web version of Codex and a desktop version of Codex. So I'll actually show you here. you can, uh, choose to work locally, um, on Codex on the desktop. And there is an option to connect Codex web. So you can kind of, uh, you know, keep those projects or those chats synced if you want to. For me, I don't use Codex on the web a ton. If I do want something quote unquote synced, normally I'll do it. Normally for me, it's little Codex, uh, you know, little coding projects, little apps that I'm building. So I'll usually kind of quote unquote connect it. Via GitHub private repo, but you can connect to the desktop version. You can connect the desktop and the web version as well by choosing, you know, changing it from work locally to connecting Codex Web. All right. Number 4, the desktop state does not sync. Here's what I mean by that. If you use multiple computers, your Codex history is not going to carry over. Same thing with Claude Code, Claude Cowork, etc. That's the same. So, uh, it is to your local computer, which for most people is not gonna be a big deal. But for me, right, I use probably about 3 machines pretty consistently almost every day. Uh, so that's one downside for me. So just keep that in mind. All right. Number 5, and I kind of mentioned this in my intro, ChatGPT works with you. Codex works for you. What do I mean by that? well, Codex is agentic, right? So the new Workspace Agents, which we went over last week, they're powered by Codex. Codex can use your computer in the background. All right? It can do work for you. It can read and write. That's the big differentiator right there. You know, whereas ChatGPT, as an example, it, for the most part, can't write. It can read all this information, but you still have to be the one copying and pasting. You know, it can create files, but you still have to save that file and email it whatever, right? Codex can literally do everything, read and write, uh, you know, browse the web, sites that you're logged into. It can do it all. Number 6, Codex is the unified workbench. What do I mean by that? Unlike Claude Desktop that has 3 different silos that don't know each other exists with Chat, Code, and Cowork, Codex is one area. You don't have to, you don't have to make any concessions and say, okay, well, I'm going to work on this project and, you know, it's, it's gonna have to live here and, you know, these other areas aren't gonna know about it. Well, you don't have that problem with Codex, let alone for the fact that Anthropic's memory doesn't actually work on the desktop, uh, right? And Codex does. All right. Number 7, already mentioned this. GitHub is essentially like your code's Google Drive. So even if you're not writing code, uh, you may still be technically having a code base, um, when you're working on something and you can sync that directly via GitHub. Also, number 8, the GitHub connection is by default. So once you set it up once, you don't even, you know, there's different settings inside Codex to where you don't even have to, you know, do a PR, you know, push something live. You can have it do it automatically. So that's really cool. Just like in Google Docs as an example, it's going to save automatically. You do have that option if you are trying to do actual building inside via Codex, that, that connection is there by default. Number 9, MCP support comes built in. This is one thing that I absolutely love. So unlike certain versions inside ChatGPT, so as an example, ChatGPT has MCP connections, but only on team accounts, which is kind of stinks for me, right? I love using my pro, my $200 a month pro account the most, but there's no MCP support in the Pro account. So inside Codex, it doesn't matter, uh, what paid plan you're on, you have MCP support. What does that mean? Even if there's not an app built in, uh, kind of in the App Store for Codex, you can just build it with MCP, right? So my great easy example is we use Beehive for our email newsletter. There's not a Beehive app inside of Codex, but there is an MCP, Model Context Protocol, server. And so I can essentially do anything. I could literally run my entire newsletter business inside of Codex because there is that read-write capability through the MCP support. All right, number 10, and we're gonna be going over this more in part 2. Uh, there is plugins, skills, and automations. So essentially skills are an open source standard. So if you use skills, uh, inside Claude or Gemini, you can actually use those same skills and you can actually import them. I'm gonna get to that here in a second. But it has default access for plugins, skills, and automation. So skills kind of teach Codex workflows. Plugins connect Codex to your external services that you use via like a traditional app or connector. And then automations let Codex repeat tasks on a schedule. So you can run those manually. You can set them up to run at a certain time every single day, once a week, etc. All right. Number 11, kind of related to what I just said. Importable Codex workflows. So Codex, or I guess OpenAI, just released this a couple of weeks ago, and it's part of the onboarding system now, which I really like. But you can also do this at any time in your general settings, is you can import literally everything, all of your skills, your chat history, your memory from any other provider. So if you are a heavy Claude Code, Claude Cowork user, heavy Gemini user, if you're using, you know, skills as an example inside Copilot, you can export all of those and then import them into Codex. All right. Number 12, which I probably won't even get to too much in part 2 because it is a little more niche and it does require a higher tiered plan. But Codex has something called Chronicle that's absolutely bonkers. So if you remember, Windows Copilot announced this feature called Recall. Or wait, now, now I'm forgetting. Was it called Recall or Rewind? This is one of those things I, I talk about AI so much, I forget. Recall. All right. So, Microsoft Copilot announced this thing called Recall. There was all this security concern and all this hoopla. So they ended up delaying it like a ton of times, but it's actually a built-in feature inside Codex. So all that is, is Codex continually takes essentially screenshots of what you're doing on your computer. So when you have that feature enabled, so It's almost like a visual memory for anything you've done on your computer. So pretty cool. There's obviously some security considerations there. Uh, so keep that in mind. All right. Number 13, you supervise agents in Codex. You just don't prompt. Like I said, a lot of the time I spend in Codex is more, um, I've, I've used this analogy before, kind of the, the, the burger analogy, uh, right? Front end and back end, the bun, spending more time as the bun and less time as the meat doing the actual work. So much more time I spend inside Codex. Is refining my agents, refining my schedules, giving them more and better context, looking at the chain of thought and improving it. So I'm really just spending more time on the front end and then on the back end tastemaking or reviewing or approving. So inside Codex, I'm spending less and less time doing the actual work and more time setting up orchestration on the front end and then doing the good old, expert-driven loop on the back end and having those iterations. All right. Number 14, this is a good one. Steer versus run. Let me just do a quick quick, a quick little example. So I'm gonna say, I'm gonna say, solve all my problems. All right. Inside Codex, you know, take your time. All right. This isn't an actual prompt. I'm just doing this to show you an example of steer versus queue. So this is important. So this is something inside ChatGPT. Maybe you've run into this because only on the Pro model tier can you interrupt ChatGPT. So Let's say normally it takes 2 to 3 minutes and you're like, oh man, I should have said something else. Do I stop? Do I wait? So inside Codex, at any point you can send another message and either have it wait in the queue or steer. All right. So in this little example, I'm just saying, solve all my problems, take your time. And then I'm going to say work only problems. All right. As a steer. So as an example, all right, I'm just telling Codex to solve all my problems. Take your time. And it would probably take a lot of time. And then I'm going to say work only problems. I'm going to click enter there. And then you have this option to steer instead. So even if you're working on a complex task, maybe it's taking 2, 3, 4, 10 minutes, having that option to either put something in queue, which is a hack in and of itself. I do that all the time. I'll probably touch on, touch on that a little bit more in part 2. But you can also steer any single query while you wait. All right. Number 15, fast facts. Terminal awareness enables iteration. So what this means, Codex can read and understand failures, whether you're doing something technical or non-technical. You no longer have to explain what went wrong because Codex can literally read the terminal and see what went wrong. That's huge. Speaking of that, number 16, visual verification changes everything, right? So in the same way that Claude uh, Claude has a great preview inspector. Uh, I think Codex has a better one, right? Because it literally has an in-app browser, um, where it can— let's just say you're building an app, building a web app, building something, right? Not only can it test it and render it in real time, uh, via its kind of built-in file browser and, uh, built-in, um, web browser, but it can also do different viewports, which is absolutely insane. So I don't know, let's just say you're building a website in Codex. So not only can you see it rendered in real time, because it can obviously write and render code. But you can also look at different viewports, which is absolutely bonkers, right? So you can see, show me what this looks like on a desktop. Show me what this looks like on a mobile view, on an iPad view, right? Different viewports. It can actually preview your design and it can actually do all that automatically without you having to do anything. All right. Number 17, browser Chrome and computer use. That is huge. So, uh, Code— uh, Codex will automatically understand what is the safest tool or the fastest, most efficient, most accurate tool to use first because there's so many different ways that it can in theory get work done on your desktop, right? It can control your actual computer. Uh, it can control your browser, uh, via computer use. It has a new Chrome, uh, extension. Um, and it can also do things via the API. So it's actually super smart in understanding how it should attack a certain problem. Them. Number 18, this is big. I did talk about this a couple of times on previous shows, but it has separate mouse and keyboard control. This is one of the biggest downsides of, uh, you know, Claude's computer use when it first came out. It went mega viral and I was trying to use it and I was super excited and I'm like, this thing just stinks because what happens is when it first came out, it, uh, mouse jacks, it keyboard jacks, it screen jacks. What that means is when Claude computer use first came out, If you were using a browser, it took it over and you couldn't use it. It took over your mouse, right? So essentially Claude's computer use, more of a gimmick, I would say, or, uh, it's more of something that works overnight while you're not working. And good luck on a $20 a month plan getting computer use to do anything. You do have to be on a Max plan to get any actual utility out of it, uh, and unless you're doing a single run a week and that's all you're using your plan for. All right. The cool thing about Codex, it literally has its own. So it, it works via the user interface, but it also works via the operating system level. So what that means is it technically has its own mouse and it has its own computer input. So I think Codex, with its browser use and, and sorry, computer use, is probably the first truly autonomous coworker. Because even with Claude Cowork, it kind of takes over what you are trying to work on. So it can really only work for you while you sleep or while you're not using that computer. With Codex, I'm all the time working at the same time, which is, uh, completely, I think, changes the human connection to AI. To say it changes what's possible is an understatement. All right, number 19, /side. All right, so what that is, you can just click /side. So I'll give you an example here. You can just click /side and start chatting inside Codex. What that means, I, I actually have to have a chat going to use that. All right, so at any time you can just do chat /side and essentially you start a side chat about anything that's happening in the main chat without taking your main chat off the rails, if that makes sense. All right, so pretty cool feature that, that most people don't know about. Number 20, subagents. My gosh, you can just literally tell, uh, Codex to create a bunch of subagents. You can give them roles, give them tasks, right? Have this subagent go plan, have this subagent go research, have this subagent build, and have this subagent do QA. Or you can just say, go use 3 subagents, break the task off how you want, and then get back to me once your subagents are done. So you don't even have to be technical. You can just go have it spin subagents. Yes, you will go through your your limits a little bit faster using subagents. But regardless, it is a something you have to know. 21, work trees isolate parallel work. What does that mean? Well, work trees, without getting too technical, essentially let different tasks happen without smashing into each other. So this is where you can have multiple agents running safer and more manageable on your local machine. So not just subagents, but you can obviously have you know, 10 different tasks going on at any given time inside Codex. And there will be kind of a visual cue here. Let me just do that thing I did earlier. I'm going to say, solve all my problems. Take your time, right? Just so we can see. So anytime a chat is working, you'll see here on my screen, there's a little toggle that shows that it's working. So work trees allow you to have multiple agents, multiple tasks, multiple automations, multiple big projects going on at the same time, and they're not going to run into each other, essentially. All right. Number 22, slash goal for power users. We're going to tackle this more in number 2, but goal is amazing. So this is a newer update, actually, and Tropic just came out with this after they saw how popular it was with Codex. And that just allows for long-running work with a clear done condition. 23, automations keep checking things. So setting up these automations, we will go over them in number 2. I had to clean up my account because I didn't want to give away too much, you know, private stuff here on my screen. But automations can run around the clock. Number 24, rules make Codex yours. So there are rules and custom instructions that you can set up, whether it's at the project level, across your whole account, etc. In the same way that you have that level of customization in Claude Code, in, you know, ChatGPT on the web, you have the same in Codex. Here's a cool one. Number 25, hold to dictate. This is a feature that OpenAI came out with in Codex a couple of weeks ago. I think it's one of the more underused features, but it has built-in system-wide dictation. So you don't even need a separate dictation tool. It's literally built into Codex. Even if you don't need to use it for Codex, you can just use it for anything on your computer. All right. Number 26. Here's another cheat code. There is a, a model called Spark. You're probably not going to find it because you have to go under this other models tab and it's only Codex 5.3 Spark. Although OpenAI has alluded to that there will be a future version of Spark. Maybe it'll be 5.4, maybe it'll be 5.5. We'll see. Spark is essentially a version, without getting too technical, of OpenAI's models that have been trained on the Cerebras chips. All that means is it's crazy fast. It's not even fair. Using Computer Use with 5.3 Codex Spark, I did some side-by-side testing. It was 18x faster than Claude Code's Computer Use. That's not an exaggeration. I literally timed it 18x faster. All right. It was about 5 to 6x faster using the normal 5.5. with computer use, but 5.3 Codex Spark, it's not the, you know, the smartest model in the world, but if you need basic computer use, that Spark model is absolutely bonkers. 27, non-technical, uh, Codex onboarding. Already talked about this, but the UI is moving away from, you know, being this terminal-only developer tool. And if you are using Codex for the first time, it has a great way to walk you through non-technical Codex users. Um, right? So being able to understand projects, plugs in, plugins, automation, browser, voice, et cetera. Uh, 28. Uh, this is huge. Doc, slides, spreadsheets. These are all built-in skills. So Codex, much like ChatGPT or Claude can do on the web, it can just build, it can just build you things, right? It can just build you a document. It can build you a presentation. You don't have to do anything special. It's a built-in skill. All right. Number 29, messy tasks make the best demos. What do I mean by that? A lot of times the best thing to do inside of Codex, or sometimes I start this in ChatGPT, is saying, based on everything you know about me, well, first go look at Codex. Then based on everything you know about me, what are some ways I could start automating my work inside of Codex and then start building those things in Codex? And you can build them all in natural language. but a lot of times it's just starting out very messy and then refining over time that you're gonna get your biggest wins inside of Codex. Number 30, Codex means validated work. What do I mean by that? Well, geez, I mean, Codex is so valuable because it cannot just do the thing, but it can inspect the result. It can fix issues and explain to you in natural language what has changed. So like I said, it's almost like having multiple AI models working at the same time because it can actually see, understand, and validate its work. Uh, number 31, the pace is moving fast. All right. Uh, so, uh, Thibault, who is the head of Codex there at OpenAI, just, um, confirmed, I think last night, uh, Codex is moving to a weekly updating schedule. I think they're gonna have Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday updates. The big— or no, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I think, or Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. I, I already forgot. Thursdays are gonna be the big releases, and then there's gonna be some smaller, you know, polish bug squashing, right? But essentially every Thursday there's going to be a big release on Codex. This isn't one of those things that, uh, a project that's going to be abandoned. Codex is getting more and more powerful by the week. All right, last but not least, let's go, let's go through it quick because I already covered these last couple fast facts. 32, Claude splits chat, code, and co-work. They work in silos. They don't know the other exists. That's not the case with Claude or sorry, with Codex. Number 33, Claude. Don't, don't get me wrong. Claude has strong work metaphors. So what do I mean by that? Live artifacts. Amazing. Dispatch. Amazing. So, you know, one thing I do want you to know about Codex is it doesn't mean it's the absolute best at everything, although I do think it is hands down the best platform if you only choose one. So keep in mind, there are still some features in Claude that are a little bit better. Although, um, I do know that OpenAI has alluded to the fact that they're bringing, uh, kind of mobile control, which is kind of the dispatch version in Claude. All right. Number 34, Codex has that execution energy. What do I mean by that? Codex feels like a legit agent that can do anything that you tell it to as long as it has the right, um, access to your data. One of the biggest issues, or one of the biggest obstacles I've had to overcome with Codex is understanding its own limitations. Because every time I tell it something and I'll work through the problem, eventually I'll be like, oh, Codex could actually do this. I just thought it couldn't. I didn't have a— right. I didn't share enough context. I didn't iterate enough. Right. So just the execution energy of Codex is unlike anything I've seen because like I said, A lot of times in Claude Desktop, you might have to go straight to Claude Code for something, uh, which can be number one, extremely expensive, extremely slow, or it can just be more limiting because there's certain things that you might want to do, carry over from chat to Code Work to code that you just can't do. 35, safety makes agents usable. So built in, although you can skip these things, I wouldn't recommend skipping these things for new users, but sandboxing approvals, protected paths, network controls, browser permissions. All of those things are built in by default. All right. So that was our last 35 fast facts. My gosh, that was a lot. All right. I said I was going to break this into two parts. Imagine if I did this in one part. But I cannot emphasize enough as we wrap up today's show, if I missed your comment, I'll get, I'll get to it after the show here. So I want to say this. Start using Codex today. I don't care if you're tied down to ChatGPT. I don't care if you, you know, feel in your mind, oh my gosh, Claude Code and Claude Cowork are amazing. Uh, right. Codex is all of those things. It is the best of ChatGPT minus a few things, right? So I'll say it's this, it's 95% of what ChatGPT can do. It's 95% of what Claude Cowork and Claude Code can do all and more all in one unified interface. And the best thing is, Over the past couple of weeks, we've seen a, a specific reach by OpenAI to make Codex more and more accessible, more and more understandable, and just more and more useful to non-technical users. So forget about the word code, forget about anything. Start using Codex. I'm telling you, it's, it's, it has the largest percentage of usage for me that any AI tool has ever had. Right. I'm using all of the big 4, right? Usually every single day. And Codex has the largest share that any single platform has ever had. It is that good. You need to start using it. Alright. So as I, as I wrap, if this one was helpful, please remember to repost this, check out the show notes, click that repost button, then go to youreverydayai.com. Thank you for tuning in. Hope to see you back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks, y'all. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creative AI studio. Just describe what you want to create in your own words, and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome while the assistant accelerates execution. Stay in control with the ability to step in and refine at any time. See it today at firefly.adobe.com. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going. For a little more AI magic, visit youreverydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.