You're in the right place if you use
ChatGPT, Claude, Claude Code, Claude
Co-work, or Codex, but don't know which
one you should use for business and how.
Because in this video, we're talking
about using AI agents effectively.
Specifically, we're talking about Codex,
OpenAI's agent tool, which is like
Claude Code, except it's an easy-to-use
interface for doing knowledge work and
coding work. In this video, we're going
to be breaking down the seven core
capabilities of Codex, OpenAI's AI agent
super app, each with real-world use
cases, so that by the end, you know
exactly [music] what it can do and where
it fits in your workflow. Let's get
started.
So, this right here is Codex. This is a
clean interface for AI agents that can
fully control your computer. At first
glance, it kind of looks like ChatGPT or
Claude, because you can create a chat,
but they're not exactly the same. When
you chat on ChatGPT or Claude and upload
files, those files are actually stored
in the cloud. With Codex, all of the
files that you upload to Codex or that
you create with Codex are stored on your
computer. Codex is made to do any task
that you might want to do on a computer.
You can create a motion graphics video.
You can create beautiful landing pages,
and directly inside Codex, you can
generate images that you can place in
your site. On Codex, you can also create
more complex games and 3D simulations.
You can also create mobile apps with a
front end and back end with a
professional design. You can also create
desktop apps in just a few prompts. You
can ask GPT 5.5 to create you an Excel
sheet after doing a ton of research, and
it can create spreadsheets with multiple
slides. It can also create any type of
Word doc with many different charts, and
you can also create presentations
directly inside Codex and export them to
Canva or any other tool you want. And I
haven't even mentioned yet that Codex
can fully control my computer, and it
can also control the browser. But, this
is something we'll talk about a little
bit later. As we go through the main
seven different capabilities of Codex,
you'll realize that it is truly a super
app that does any coding task or any
knowledge work task. Let's not waste any
time. Let's hop into capability number
one. So, the first capability that Codex
has is full file access. You see, when I
use ChatGPT, all of the files that I
give to ChatGPT or that ChatGPT
generates are stored in the cloud.
However, when we use Codex, all of the
files that are created or the files that
I give to it are stored on your
computer. And the agent inside Codex has
full access to your computer. Let me
show you. In my downloads folder, I have
a folder called receipts to process. And
we just have 60 different little photos
of receipts that I've added to this
folder. I can simply ask Codex, "In the
downloads folder, you'll see my receipts
that I need to process. I want you to
analyze them in an Excel sheet and
create charts that helps me visualize
the types of transactions and any other
patterns that you notice." So, we can
choose our model, which is GPT 5.5 high,
and we can run it. And the agent,
because it has full file access, it can
access any file on my computer, it'll
find the relevant folder and complete
the task. And you can see here, it found
the target folder, which is users Riley
Brown downloads receipts to process with
only 53 receipts. I'm going to OCR
those, and so we're going to extract the
text from those receipts, classify and
categorize each transaction. Now, it's
creating an Excel workbook on my
computer that we can open up in Codex.
All right. So, after 7 minutes, it is
now done and we can very easily just
open this Excel project up directly
inside Code X and you can see that it
has created this file. We can see
there's a dashboard, the total spend is
25,982.
We see receipts,
category summary, payment summary, and
we can see all the different trends, the
spend by payment method. We can see the
monthly trends. This is an Excel sheet
and because it's on our computer, if you
click this down arrow, you can see open
in folder and we can see the exact file
location of this Excel spreadsheet. So,
now that we know that all of the files
created on Code X live on your computer,
the question becomes how do you stay
organized? And I will tell you the best
way that you can stay organized inside
Code X is to work in a project. So, you
can create a chat in one of two ways.
One way you can create a chat is if you
just go to this chats category and you
just hit this new chat button. It allows
you to create a chat that just shows up
here in the sidebar. It's not actually
inside a project. Or, you can go ahead
and you can create a project and you can
always hit start at existing folder. all
of my projects in my documents folder
and then I will just create a new
project seven capabilities cuz that's
what we're talking about. We can create
a new folder and now we see that we're
creating a new chat inside the seven
capabilities folder. You'll see here
this project will show up here in the
left side panel and as soon as I add a
chat, you can see the chat shows up
here. The cool part about Code X is you
can multitask and you can create
multiple chats at the same time. Here,
I'm going to ask the agent to create a
Word doc.
And we're doing this within a chat
inside the seven capabilities folder.
Any document that the agent creates when
it's in a chat inside a project will
actually store the document that it
creates in this folder on your computer.
So, if we click these three dots here
and say open in finder
and we open the seven categories
folder, we'll see that there's nothing
in it. And that's because the agent is
not done creating the document. As soon
as the agent's done, it's going to put
the
uh document that it creates in this
project. And as you can see here, we
have this Word doc that was created and
it's called learn 90% of OpenAI Codex in
under 2 minutes. You can see the title
of the folder right here. If we go ahead
and open up finder at that location and
we click on outputs and docs, you can
see that that document is located right
here. So, this is literally on my
computer by default. And so, this video
that I'm making now is called the seven
capabilities of Codex. And if we were to
create a new chat in this folder, the
chat would be aware that it is starting
out in this project. I can type at learn
and see I can actually at mention any
file that's created within this seven
capabilities folder. And I can say,
"Please turn this into a landing page, a
good learning resource
for my viewers."
And so, I can take any document within
this folder and I can just at mention it
and say, "Please turn this to a landing
page." And because it can control my
computer and go look at all of the
documents that are organized very
easily, it can find the right document
and then create a landing page. And the
code for that landing page will exist on
my computer. And here we go, it's done.
We can open this up and we can see that
it created a landing page based on that
document that is stored on our computer.
And let's go ahead and move on to the
next capability. Next up, Codex has
something called persistent memory. So,
within Codex, there's two types of
memory. There's manual memory, and
there's auto memory. Manual memory is
when you ask the agent to remember
something, when you tell it, "Hey, can
you remember this going forward in the
future?" Let me show you an example. So,
I made a few changes to that landing
page and got it to create it in this
format with this little left sidebar. We
can scroll down, and we can
automatically snap to the section that
we like. I really like this format, and
so
from now on, can you please use this
format whenever I ask for a landing page
and I don't specify
uh the styling?
You should use this styling and remember
that if there's a lot of text content to
use this table of contents.
So, I can simply just ask the agent to
remember this, and it's automatically
going to add it to the agents.md file,
which is where you can see here, search
for agents.md. This is where it's going
to store this information for later. And
so, you can see here, the agent updated
its manual memory, which is the
agents.md file. If we click on this,
here are the things that I've asked it
to add in the past. Here's the what it
just added. It says for landing pages
that are made for learning purposes, it
says use this text first format, um and
then it kind of describes the style that
I like. This agents.md file is a living
document that gets updated over time
that acts as the manual memory. But,
there's also a different type of memory
that you should never
and this is an auto memory feature that
Codex kind of keeps updated
automatically. And just like the
agents.md file, this is all stored in a
file on your computer. If we go to Codex
and hit command N to create a new chat,
please tell me about what you have in
the and then Codex / memories folder. I
want to understand
what you know. Also, open that file. And
you can see here it
gave me the path to this file. We can go
ahead and open this up. And this is a
document you should not touch. You can
just kind of observe it to see what the
agent observes about you. And so every
few weeks I'll actually go through this
and take a look. And this actually gives
me a nice little summary of all of the
different tasks that I've asked my agent
to do. And it can be useful when helping
other people build out similar
workflows. I do not recommend making
manual changes to these memories, right?
Just let the agent store the memories
however it wants to because the agent
has a skill that keeps these updated and
it will get better over time. The
agents.md file on the other hand is your
manual memory. This is meant for you to
keep it updated. You can tell the agent
to update it or you can manually update
it if you want. The third huge
capability that Codex has is plugins.
And so plugins are basically just Codex
connections. They are installable,
reusable bundles that connect the OpenAI
Codex AI agent to external tools, apps,
and workflows. And this allows them to
have other functionality and they can
connect to all of the tools that you
use. And so if you go to the plugins
tab, with two clicks I can add Slack and
I can add Gmail. Once you've added
Gmail, and you can see here this plugin
actually comes with some skills. So
there's a Gmail skill and an inbox
triage skill that is part of this
plugin. Right now, I think there's over
100 different plugins that allow you to
connect Codex to the tools that you
already use. So, let's go over an
example. So, I created a new project,
which is a folder on my computer called
brand deals, and I'm going to say, "I
want you to look at my email from the
past 2 weeks. Find all the brands
offering to do paid promotion, do
research on all of them, and put them in
a table with relevant notes." And then I
can type the at sign, and here I can
type in Gmail. All of the plugins show
up in this menu, so we can very easily
at mention the plugins. And this is a
quick way to see which plugins that you
have access to. And I really like using
this menu, and then we can go ahead and
click send.
And now Codex will search through all of
my recent emails because I've given it
access via the plugin, and it will get
back to us. This is taking about like 5
minutes so far, and I have another idea
for a task I want an AI agent to do. So,
I can very easily just hit this new
message button, and I can type out
exactly what I want. So, I'm making my
next video on CLIs and MCPs in Codex.
Please look at my Notion, and so I at
mention Notion, which is a plugin, and
find my high-quality long-form scripts.
Then I want you to please write a script
on this topic. Use Excalidraw diagrams.
This is a skill, which I'll get to next.
We can run this prompt. And so now we
have two AI agents working, both working
with plugins. So, the brand deals task
is done. If we go ahead and open up this
document right here, we can see that it
created file, and it went through all of
my emails and wrote down the companies
offering to sponsor my videos all the
way down. It literally went through all
of them and took detailed notes and
said, "What did they ask for?" And also
they added some research notes. And then
I could ask it to respond to the emails
because of the same way that it can read
my emails, it can also send emails from
my account. And if we go to the Notion
plugin that we tested, we can see here
that it created this document, and it
went through my Notion, found all the
scripts that I made previously, and it
said, "Do you ever feel like AI coding
tools are getting more powerful every
week, but also somehow more confusing?"
And this is literally in my voice
because it went through all of my
scripts, and it created this document
using the Notion plugin. And that brings
us to the fourth capability that Codex
has, which are skills. And you can think
of skills on Codex as reusable workflow
recipes or SOPs that your agent can use
many times over and over again. In
Codex, if you go up to the plugins tab,
you see that there's actually a subtab
within plugins, which are skills. And in
the skills tab, these are similar to
plugins. They're more like instruction
files that your agent will follow every
time it wants to use one of these
skills. So, all your skills can be found
in the plugins folder in the skills
subfolder. But, how do you actually
create a skill? In order to create a
skill, you can type a prompt just like
this. I want you to create a skill
called brand deal analysis that does
blank. And I could enter this prompt in
and create this skill, and then once
that's done, in order to use any skill,
you just press this slash. And so, I can
use my Excalidraw diagram skill just by
typing
slash. I can also use my YouTube
researcher skill or my YouTube thumbnail
skill, which we'll get to in just a
second.
These are all skills that I can quickly
access by typing slash. These are
different than plugins, which I can
access by typing at. So, there's two
main ways to create a skill in Codex.
One is the prompt to skill, which is
basically just I want you to create a
skill called blank that does blank. This
will give you a reusable instructions
file, which is a skill, but I don't
think it will be as good as option one.
The best way to create a skill, in my
opinion, is to use the manual workflow
method, where you basically ask your
agent to do something, it'll do it, and
then you basically go back and forth,
right? Tell it to create something, and
say, "Hey, I want you to change it." And
you say, "Get the output right." If
you're not happy, you iterate more, and
you kind of go back through this
process, and you loop around until
you're happy with the output. And then
you reverse engineer the skill, and you
will basically end up saying something
like, "I'm happy with this output. Turn
it into a skill." And I'll actually show
you. If we go back to Codex, and you can
see here, I've asked the agent to put
all those paid promos into a spreadsheet
right here. And I really like this
spreadsheet. I think it's high quality.
I think it's color-coded, right, by the
different priority. This is looking
really good. And remember, you can
always full screen it to get a better
look at whatever document it is that
you're creating.
And so, well, all we need to do is we
need to just type this in. "I'm happy
with this output. Turn this into a skill
that I can use." And the agent is smart
enough to be like, "Okay, this is he
wants to always be able to analyze his
Gmail for brand sponsorships. Alternate
into a skill." And so, now it's done. It
says, "I've created and validated the
reusable skill called brand deal
researcher skill.md."
And we can open up this skill by uh
clicking on the skill.md file, and we
can actually read this over. And it
turned our entire workflow into these
instructions. And the AI is very smart
enough at taking anything that you've
done with your agent, and turning it
into a skill. So, now if we hit command
N to create a new chat, "I want you
uh to please do {slash} It's called
brand
deal researcher.
Right? So, now we have this reusable
skill that we can use at any point. And
you can see here it's using all of the
same plugins. It's using the Gmail
plugin. So, a skill can contain
instructions to use a specific plugin
because at the end of the day it's just
instructions to do a simple task. While
our research brand deal task is loading,
I actually went ahead and did a create
Excalidraw graphics for the seven
capabilities. The video that we're doing
now, remember this document that we
created earlier which is this landing
page that describes all of the different
things that we're talking about in this
video. I went ahead and I just said,
"Please look at that document and make a
ton of graphics on a single Excalidraw
doc. Use the Excalidraw diagram skill
and make the chart super useful." So,
then the AI thought and worked for 4
minutes and 23 seconds and then it
created this.
And we can open this up and we can just
automatically
basically import this project and boom,
look at this. It created this entire
outline and I love this formatting. This
formatting that it did with the
background here, I actually really like
that. And so, it created all of the
diagrams. Wow, this is actually
fantastic. It has the intro, all of the
summaries, memory, plugins versus
skills, skill creation. Very cool. So,
now I can go back to Codex and I can
say, "Wow, I really like the formatting
that you did here. Please update the
skills so that you always put them in
the containers that you did and I want
you to always give me a link with all of
the diagrams that you create when I ask
you to create multiple diagrams just
like this. I love it."
And so, even once you've used a skill,
maybe you've used it for a while and you
like it and then you get surprised by
something valuable like this diagram
right here or these this formatting, you
can always just say, "Hey, I want you to
always format it like this." And so,
every time you use the skill is an
opportunity to make the skill even
better. Just tell your agent to update
the skill to always do something. The
next capability of Codex is built-in GPT
image to access. So, you can generate
images with the best image model in the
world directly inside Codex. So, I
created a new project called content,
and here I'm saying, "Generate a product
photo for my uh sweater company. This is
our first sweater. I can paste an image
of a sweater, and you can see here, this
is the first sweater, knitted sweater
that I'm making. Please create five
images with GPT/image/2
of different models of different
nationalities
wearing this sweater. Three of the
images should have one person,
one image should have three people, the
last image should have five people."
And so, we can run this, and within the
content folder, it's going to create
images. And those images will live
inside the content folder once it's
done. And look at this. You can see here
that it's using the skill.md
for image gen. And so, this image gen
skill is built into Codex. And so, you
can go to Codex, click on skills, and
you can see which skills are built into
the system. And you don't have to enable
them, but these are recommended skills
by Codex, and one of them is image gen.
And by default, this uses the latest and
best image model. And you can see here
that it generated one of the images. We
still need to wait for the other four.
Okay, here, it just generated the second
image. It just generated the third
image. The next image should have three
people in one image. And here we go.
Here is number four, and here is number
five. And now that you know that you can
generate images, that brings me to the
next capability of Codex, which is
browser use and computer use. And so in
order to use computer use, it is a
plugin. So remember, you just type in at
computer use. Now I can say, "Please
open the Canva app on my computer, make
a new presentation, and put each one of
these images on each of the slides." So
one image per slide, there should be
five total slides.
We can simply tell Codex to control our
computer and it will do it. And as you
can see here, we see list Mac apps and
now it's looking at Canva. You can see
here, it's controlling my computer. I'm
not even touching it. It just created
this presentation. It's clicking in
Canva. Okay. Oh, it just ran a script, I
believe. And so it just ran a script.
It's looking at Canva and you can see
here it created this presentation
and it has all five
images on the computer. And you can see
here, this is the mouse. You can see the
mouse outline of the computer use. It
will move around from time to time. It
created this presentation for me.
So this right here is a browser and you
can see that if we literally exit out of
this and hit plus sign, we can see
browser. And when we open this
index.html file, it's literally opening
this in a browser. So now I'm going to
say, "Turn this into an app, then test
the interface and make sure the buttons
and navigation work using at browser
use."
And I can run this prompt here. And now
it's going to take this, turn it into an
app, and then it's just going to test it
by controlling the browser inside Codex.
Okay, you can see here, it's kind of
like a different color. Look, this is my
mouse right here. This is the browser
use. So the AI is actually controlling
the browser and it's going to start
testing them. So, we see that it's test
start button, and the AI is now taking
control of the screen. The first visible
check showed the app controls, but the
start button smooth scroll is too subtle
for live verification. You can see here
it's moving around. It's scrolling
through the app.
It's clicking on the different quizzes
that it's created.
Now, it's testing quiz completion, and
now it just marked this a correct
answer. So, it's making sure that all
parts of the application work.
Oh, now it tested the side panel, and
now we're at the bottom.
This is very cool. Anything you can open
up in the browser, you can ask browser
use. You can use the @browseruse
plugin to test it directly inside Codex.
And finally, capability number seven
inside Codex is automation. You can
create automation simply by talking to
Codex. So, remember this Excel sheet
that we created in this chat here in the
brand deals project called research paid
promo brand deals. We created this
spreadsheet after it analyzed all of my
incoming emails with the email plugin.
Then, we took this output, and we turned
it into a skill. I'm happy with this
output. Please turn it into a skill.
Now, what I can do is I can repeatedly
do this on a weekly or daily or hourly
basis. I can simply say, "Please do this
every single Friday at 9:00
a.m., please, and update this sheet."
What this is going to do is it's going
to create an automation. Notice here we
only see two automations.
Here it says, "I'll set this up as a
recurring automation for Fridays at 9:00
a.m."
And we can see it directly in the UI.
Created weekly brand deal sheet updated
and if we click on this, we can see the
automation details. We can see that at
Friday at 9:00 a.m. We can see that it's
active. We can see that the last run is
empty because it's never run before and
we can see that we are using the brand
deal researcher skill to scan Gmail for
paid promotion sponsorship brand deal
influencer campaigns, etc. So created
this and now if we go to the automations
tab, we now see it up here. We can see
Friday at 9:00 a.m. We have another one
at Fridays at 9:00 a.m. We can click on
this and you can edit it directly. And
finally, we have a bonus capability
inside Codex which is something called
Chronicle. So this is a brand new
feature within Codex. If we go to
settings and we click settings and we go
to personalization and we scroll down,
you will see an option to to use
Chronicle research preview. When you
turn this on, what this will do is it'll
say that it is running and this one may
seem a little bit invasive. What this
one does is it basically is always
recording your screen so it has context
with what you're working on. And so if I
go to my presentation here and I just
kind of scroll around in my browser, use
Chronicle.
Uh tell me what I should add
to my Codex visual presentation.
And so it shows you here all use
Chronicle skill for live screen work
content then cross everything over.
Chronicle's available so I'm checking
the fresh screen state first and look at
this, you can see that it's pulling up
recent screenshots of my screen here.
And so it is pulling old images and it's
getting context from what I've had open
on my screen recently. And so it's able
to keep track of all the things that I'm
working on and the way that you invoke
it is just say use Chronicle.
And so it says based on Chronicle, I'd
add these to your visual presentation. A
Codex super app map, a full control loop
diagram for prompt files, a Chronicle
demo slide, reusable skills slide, and
why Codex over other tools slide. And
so, it automatically, and I didn't give
it any [clears throat] information, I
didn't upload an image or give it an
Excalidraw document, it just knew what
was in this slide deck here.
And it's able to understand it because
this Chronicle feature watches my screen
and takes screenshots constantly. And
so, those are the main features and
abilities within Codex. And in summary,
we covered that Codex has full file
control, meaning you can create, edit,
and delete any file. It has persistent
memory, and whether that is automatic
memory or manual memory in your
agents.md file. We also talked about
plugins, which are built into the
platform. It connects your agent to all
of the tools that exist. You can create
skills by taking any task that you
create with the agent and then
converting that into a skill.
Your Codex agent has access to image
generation, and it is the best image
generation model in the world, which is
GPT-image-2.
We also have browser control and
computer use, and this allows your agent
to control your computer like a human.
The human interface, which is a
keyboard, a mouse, and a screen, can now
be used by agents, and it's getting
better exponentially. And we also have
automations. You can take any useful
task that your agent does and say, "Hey,
do this every day. Hey, do this every
hour. Hey, do this every week. Do this
every month." That type of thing. And
then as a bonus, we talked about
Chronicle. Anyway, thank you guys so
much for watching. I hope you got a lot
out of this video. I make videos like
this every single week, so make sure to
subscribe and hit that like button. It
helps me out a lot. I'll see you here
for the next video.