OpenAI Codex Explained for Normal People (“Claude Cowork Killer”)

0:00Open AI's Codex isn't just for coding. It's also really good at knowledge work. Things like creating files on your computer, generating personalized infographics, automating tasks like emails, and building custom dashboards tailored for your needs. At first glance though, Codex can look very intimidating. But as a non-coder myself, I'm going to explain how to use it in a way that anyone can understand. In fact, it will only take you about 15 minutes to really master everything you need to get started. This is Codex. It's really just an app for your computer. Now, this may look very similar to Chat GPT, and indeed, it can do a lot of the same

0:38things Chat GPT can do. But the way Codex works is fundamentally different. With Chat GPT, everything you create lives in the cloud. Codex, on the other hand, will interact and create files directly on your computer. If you've ever used Claude CoWork, this idea will feel very similar. In fact, many people are calling Codex the Claude CoWork killer. To get started, you want to download the Codex app. You can find

1:04this at chat.openai.com/codex. Here is a button to download it, so I'll click on that. Then I'll open the download, drag Codex into my applications folder, and I'll open Spotlight and search for Codex, and open it up. The first thing it'll ask you to do is to sign in with your Chat GPT account. So, the good news here is that if you have a Chat GPT subscription, Codex is included as part of that at no additional cost. So, I'll click here

1:36where it says continue with Chat GPT. That will then open up my browser, where I'll sign in to my Chat GPT account, and that will then authorize Codex. Great. So, once you're signed in, Codex will ask you some questions about how it can best help you. Um the first question it'll ask you is what type of work do you do? So, the interesting thing about Codex is that it is designed for both coding and for everyday use, as they call it. So, if you're watching this video and you're not a coder, you want to avoid telling it that you do things like engineering or things like what

2:10else? Like product development. Instead, you want to select something like you're a student, or maybe you're into marketing, whatever it is that you actually do. In this case, I will select something else, because none of these quite apply. Maybe marketing, so I'll select that one, and then click on continue. Next, it will ask you if you want to bring your setup from another agent like Claude CoWork over into CoWork. If you've never used Claude CoWork before, you can skip this step, or it'll probably tell you that it wasn't able to find another setup, so you can just ignore this. I'm going to not do this. I want to start completely

2:47fresh. So, I'll just leave it like this and click on continue. And now Codex is ready to be used. Everything starts right here in this chat box. And to stay as organized as possible, you want to work inside of folders on your computer, or as Codex calls them, projects. But projects are really just folders that exist on your computer. So, right here on this drop-down, you can select a folder that will then be turned into a Codex project. So, I'll click on add new project. That will then bring up your finder, and you can select the folder you want to work inside of. Or if you

3:23want to set up a brand new folder for this project, just click on new folder. But here I have a folder that contains a bunch of receipts from a trip I recently took. So, I'm going to select that folder and click on open. Right here, you can see that folder is now selected. It says receipts, and over here on the

3:39left, under projects, we see receipts. So, this project is now matched up with that folder. So, let's ask it to do something for us. I'll tell it to create an Excel file that categorizes all of these receipts with a breakdown of each expense and the total cost for the trip. Right here, we can select the model that we want to use. So, clicking on the drop-down, right here, you can see the model. I'm going to leave it on GPT 5.5, which is the current latest model, and you can select the intelligence level from low to extra high. For most tasks, I've been running it on medium and high

4:15and getting great results with that. So, I'll leave it on medium, and then I'll send it along. Now that it's done, you can see right here that it created for me this Excel file. And what's really nice about Codex is that you can click on that, and it actually opens it up for you in this side panel. So, I don't have to open this up in Microsoft Excel to

4:35see it. It's right here inside of Codex. And clicking on the long the top here, it actually gives us multiple, what do they call them in Excel? Like pages or tabs of all the different categorizations that it did based on these receipts. Now, what you can also do is, let's go ahead and collapse this by clicking on the top right here to collapse this, and I can click on this down arrow and click open in folder, and here you can see all of the receipts that I had uploaded and the Excel file in here. So, once again, these Excel files and every file created by Codex lives on your

5:11computer. You own it. Of course, you're not just limited to Excel files though. Codex can make pretty much any type of file. So, let's click on the top left here where it says new chat, and I'll show you another use case. This time, instead of typing out my prompt, I'll dictate it to Codex, because the voice dictation tool is very

5:30good inside of Codex. I'll click on this and then just tell it what I want. Figure out my brand color, font, and brand styling by visiting my website, pauljlipskey.com, and from that, I want you to create a markdown file that contains what is essentially my brand kit, so that we can follow that in the future to make sure

5:50that anything we create stays on brand. Now, because this is completely different from the last use case, we'll create a new project for this. I'll click on the drop-down here, click on add a new project, and I'll put this inside of here. I will select new folder and call this one brand guide, and then click on open. So, now we have this new project. We have our prompt, and I can

6:14send it along. So, this is likely going to take a few minutes, and I don't want to have to stay focused on Codex while this is working. So, what I'll do is I'll come over to chats here. You can see these underneath the projects, and start a new chat. Any chats you start inside of this section aren't tied to a project. Generally speaking, I suggest that you start every chat inside a project, but there are times where it doesn't really make

6:42sense, and you just want a one-off chat. And this is an example of that, because I want to show you a really cool feature inside of Codex that is more important than it seems. Once you come into a new chat, type / and then type in pet. Right here, you'll see a command that

6:58says wake or tuck away the desktop pet. Select that, and now on the bottom right, you have your little pet jumping around. Now, this is cute and all, but the real purpose of this is that you can multitask, like maybe go browse something on the web, and this will alert you when something needs your attention. So, right here, you can see that it is working on creating your brand kit, but there's a little bit of an alert here telling you you need to do something. So, I'll click on this. That will then bring me over to that chat, and you can see right here, it's asking

7:32me for permission to allow network access. So, I'll click on submit. Now, you can see it working. So, once again, I can return back to a fresh chat, do anything else I want, or maybe browse the web, and this will alert me if this task that's running needs my attention again. So, now that task is done, and I know that, even though I'm not inside the Codex app, because my pet has this green circle here. That lets me know that a task is complete. I can open it up, click on it, and come right over to the task. So, let's open this up and see what it looks like. Here is my brand

8:07kit. And once again, this is inside that folder we just created. Now, using this, I want to show you something else you can do with Codex, which are skills. Skills are a set of instructions for Codex. Whenever you invoke a certain skill, Codex will load those instructions. It means you never have to repeat yourself ever again. So, let's try it out. I'll collapse this side panel, and I'll just tell it to create a skill called on brand. Every time I use it, apply the brand kit to whatever I'm having you make. So, notice that I'm not going into the settings to create a skill. I just literally tell Codex to

8:47create a skill for me, and it's going to do that. And you can do this for anything. So, if you ever find yourself repeating the same instructions over and over again, or if Codex makes something for you that is just perfect, you can say, "That was great. Now, turn that into a skill, so we can do it again the same exact way in the future." The skill

9:07is now created, so let's test it out. I'll start a new chat, and this time, I'll point it at a folder that I've created in the past that contains all of my presentations. Then, I will tell it, "Do some research on Open AI's Codex versus Claude CoWork. Create an infographic with your findings." To invoke the skill, I'll then do and type in the name of the skill, which is on brand. You can see it pops up here, so I will select it. It then knows that it should use the brand kit to create this infographic, because that is what the skill will tell it to do. So,

9:46sending this along, it will begin getting to work. And this is using Open AI's latest image generation model, Images 2.0, which is widely considered the best image generation model in the world. And looking at the results, you can see why that is. Let's have Codex do something more advanced now, email triage. This will introduce a few new concepts that will help you get the most out of Codex. Back on the homepage, I

10:11set up a new project called emails. Now, I will tell it to set up an email triage system. I want you to be able to scan through my email inbox, draft replies in my tone of voice, and based on how I've historically responded to emails, I want everything sort of tailored to the way that I've worked. I want you to learn and adapt over time to

10:33get better at helping me with my emails. Now, if I were to just send this prompt to Codex, it wouldn't actually be able to do this for me because Codex isn't connected up with my Gmail account. To do that, all I have to do is type in the word Gmail. So, like for instance, if I

10:51said, "Use my Gmail." You can see right here that Codex pops up this notification to let me know that I should install the Gmail plugin. Now, plugins are basically just connectors to third-party tools. So, in this case, it's the connection between Codex and Gmail. So, I will install this so that Codex can actually help me with my Gmail. Great. So, now when I send this along, Codex has the connection with Gmail, it knows what I want it to do, and it will begin getting to work. And this demonstrates one of the best tips

11:28that I can give you for using Codex. Tell Codex what you want and let it figure out how to get it done. And that's what's happening right here. It's setting up files and folders inside my computer on my computer to better track my emails. I haven't told it how to do that, it's figuring it out on its own. With everything now set up and one triage complete, I'm happy with the way that this worked. So, I want this to run every day now at 9:00 a.m. So, I'll just

11:57tell it to do that. Great. Now, run this every morning at 9:00 a.m. And after submitting that, it will set up an automation. You can see that right here, and I can even click on this to see what that automation looks like. You can also find automations and plugins over here on the left. So, first

12:15we have plugins. Let's look at that one. We already covered a Gmail plugin, and you can see all the other plugins that are available here. And in my experience, the more plugins that you add, the more helpful tools like Codex are going to be at helping you. So, if you use Canva a lot, add Canva. If you want to use Remotion to create motion graphics, add that one. If you use Google Drive or you have a lot stored in there, you can you you can connect that

12:42one up. You can connect Google Calendar. The more you share, the more it's going to know about you and actually be able to take action inside these third-party apps. You can also find your automations up here on the top left under plugins. We have our one automation, morning Gmail triage, but if you set up any other ones, they're all going to appear here. So, if you wanted to edit them or turn them off, this is the place you could do that. Now, let's do one quick final fun

13:07example. Point Codex to any project folder on your computer. I'll select this one right here and click on new chat inside that project. And then you want to tell it, "Spin up a fun interactive dashboard for me. Make it interesting." And from that, it made for me this. So, don't feel like you're trapped in the box of what a traditional file is. You can have it create things like this to make the information that's on your computer and in your files a lot more

13:38interactive and interesting to look at. So, guess what? You now know more than enough to get started with Codex. As you see, it's really not that complicated. Once you master a few of its features, you'll be automating all your busy work in no time. If, however, you want to learn some of the more advanced things you can do with Codex, things like creating videos, having it control your computer, or more advanced automations, let me know that in the comment section down below. If enough people are interested, I'll do a part two to this video. Regardless, I really appreciate you watching all the way to the end of

14:10this video. I hope that means that something about this video resonated with you. If that's the case, then consider subscribing to my channel. I promise I'll deliver more tutorials just like this one where I make AI tools accessible to everyone. For now though, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye for now.