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.