Stop using Claude. Start using Codex [ part 1]

Stop Using Claude. Start Using Codex (Part 1)
Is it time to rethink your AI coding assistant? In Part 1 of this episode, we explore why many developers are turning their attention from Claude to Codex for coding, automation, and software development workflows.
Discover the strengths of Codex, where it excels, how it compares with other AI coding tools, and the types of projects where it can make a real difference. We'll also cover practical use cases, productivity tips, and key factors to consider before switching your workflow.
🎧 Tune in for an insightful discussion on the evolving world of AI coding assistants and learn how to choose the right tool for your development needs.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Some of my smartest friends are saying OpenAI's Codex is the super app for AI. They're saying you pair that with GPT 5.5, Images 2.0, and use Codex's interface, and you are going to be unstoppable. So I called my friend Riley Brown to convince me that I should be using Codecs with all these models. And in this episode, we go through everything how to use it from A to Z, how to create skills, how to connect it to Notion, how to use remotion to create beautiful videos. If you've been meaning to get good at Codex, but you haven't had a second, well, this is your episode. You're in for a treat. And if you want to show some love to me and Riley, give this a like and comment, and I'll see you in there.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

People are going to learn how to use the best interface to use AI agents, in my opinion. I think Codecs by OpenAI. And that means if you have a ChatGPT subscription, you have access to Codecs, which I think is the most powerful way to use AI agents. And we're going to learn the platform. And we're going to talk about GPT 5.5, which was released yesterday as of filming this. I don't know when this episode will be out. We'll talk a little bit about browser use. And you know, I've been a little skeptical about AI controlling browsers. I think it's kind of slow and a little boring. This is the first time that I see it. I'm like, oh, it's actually starting to be faster. And I could definitely see by the end of the year, these browser agents are going to be as fast as humans. So we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about computer use. We're going to talk about just doing all of your knowledge work and coding work inside one single platform, which is Codecs. How does that sound?

SPEAKER_01 1:58

This well, I I just have to be honest with you. I got to say something. I am not on Codecx today. In fact, I have never downloaded Codecs. I it's just, I'm not in that world, okay? And this episode for me is a firsthand basically tour hacks, tips and tricks. By the end of this episode, I want to be converted. I want to be converted to codecs in that ecosystem. I hope so. But I might be wrong. I might by the end of this episode, I might be like, you know what? I'm just going to stick with my own stack. And you know, this is. There's just a lot of smoke here. So let's No, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

You know what? And I want to preface this by saying, like, I don't hate on anyone for using any stack. I think it's kind of dumb to do that. I think you have you should pick a stack and you should stick with it. Um I think moving from hot tool to hot tool is actually not the right strategy. If you're using clawed code uh inside cursor, right? If you use cursor for all your knowledge work and that works for you, great. Just keep doing that if you want. Uh I'm kind of permanently switching to codecs just because you know I work with seven engineers and all of them have switched to codecs. And we agree that it's pretty amazing. And you can use clawed code inside of it, which is uh another bonus. But um you if you don't mind, I just kind of want to hop into kind of an Excaladra, kind of do a little precursor to Codex if that's cool with you.

SPEAKER_01 3:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:23

Okay, so um, yeah, so I like to start with the basics. I've been uh tr really trying to get people uh to understand the difference between Chat GPT and Codecx. Um and so a good way to think about Codex is it is a state-of-the-art AI agent on your computer, which is the the codecs model or the GPT 5.5 model, in a nice interface that allows you to build an app, create any type of document, control your computer, and create automations. You can see that, right? This is the codecs interface. It looks a lot like ChatGPT, right? This is a new chat on Codecs. And um what I like to do whenever I create a new uh like whenever I go to Codecs, and let's say I'm working on a new episode. Maybe I'm working on the Startup Ideas Podcast landing page, and then I'm also doing some market research. So we can actually create a new project, and we can actually start from an existing folder, and let's just call this folder um Greg, or let's call it Startup Ideas Podcast. And we can just create a new folder, and this folder will be over here on the side. Can you see this? Maybe I'll zoom in a little bit. Um and anytime I hit new chat, this chat will show up in here. As you can see here, I have all my threads over here on the side, and they're all kind of organized. Notice there wasn't anything in this one, and you can very easily just remove these from the side. So it's just like you have your folder and your chats within each folder, which is just a project. And so like research, uh startup ideas, podcast, look at his videos, and so I have a skill, which is YouTube researcher, and this allows me to immediately pull transcripts from YouTube channels. So I can say, like, take the transcripts uh from his last 10 videos and tell me only what he's doing wrong. Be negative, make a report. And so then you can fire this off. And what I like is it's very tailored to multitasking. So I can press Command N. And I I this interface is a little similar to Manus, if you've ever used Manus before. It's very easy to see which what your agents are doing, right? If it's done, you'll see a blue dot. As you can see here, these two are done. These are kind of like unread chat, so like it means it's done and I haven't clicked on it yet. While it's working, it kind of spins around. Um, and so like uh what is the startup ideas podcast? And so you can see here it kind of just organizes chats into threads. And what we're seeing is this is kind of the dominant interface to interact with AI agents. You can see here this is the new Claude Code desktop app. Right here, you can see their code feature. It's very similar. You have these folders with chats underneath it. And if you've seen the new cursor interface, it's very similar. So all of these companies are deciding that this is kind of the correct interface to interact with AI agents. It just so happens that I think Codex is the best one. So let's go back to ARC. And so the way that I see it is like in 2025, that was the year of the TUI, right? We had we had this type of interface with Cloud Code. And it's kind of a um, it's bittersweet because I missed these early days of using Cloud Code. I loved the terminal. It was really fun. And I think back to the early days when you and and a few others were talking about vibe marketing. And I think there was so I think it was super directionally correct using AI agents to do a lot of marketing tasks. I just think I'm curious to hear what your observation was. Is this just wasn't a great interface for a lot of the people who wanted to get the benefits from it, but they didn't want to open a terminal or create skills like in these files. I think people in business just want an easier interface to do all of these agentic workflows. And so what all these companies are deciding on is that the GUI is better. So we're moving from a terminal interface to a more clean, simple interface. You have your chats on the left, your agent in the middle, and then whatever the agent is working on on the right. Another way that I like to think about this is Claude Code, or this codex is like Claude Code and Cowork in a single product, but it's even better than that. And the reason why I like it more than Claude Desktop is Claude made a decision to split up course and claude code. I would definitely try Claude more if they didn't do this. I do not like them just like they decided that people who are in business are gonna use one product, people who want to code are gonna use this other product. They have different limitations, right? You can't just ask co-work to build an app. You have to go to Claude Code to do that. Claude Cowork has different sets of permissions than Claude Code. And you know me, I'm super hyped on vibe coding. I think vibe coding has gotten so easy that like 95% of the things that you would want to code, it's as easy as creating a presentation. So I think and all a pro all a PowerPoint doc. Sorry if I'm kind of jumping around here, but within the um codecs app, right, Codex app is I can create this lay uh this app right here. So this is an app. This is a I posted this on Twitter yesterday. This is in one prompt. This is like a train simulator, uh, and it's super good at physics. And this is me just testing the model having fun. And I even added a crash counter so these trains can crash into each other and it's presented by Allstate. Um but the point is, is in the same interface, you can create an application, and you can also create uh spreadsheets. As you can see here, it can create charts, spreadsheets, you can also create word docs, you can edit and export these word docs, and you can create PowerPoint presentations, and you can export them with different apps. So you can export this to Canva, and this will just open it up directly in Canva so I can make further edits and they're gonna add more exporting features as time goes on. Because me as a startup founder, I'm constantly making all types of docs, and I'm making a lot of landing pages, lead magnets. I want to do it all in one interface. And so that's kind of the main reasons that I use codecs. Any thoughts so far?

SPEAKER_01 10:07

Uh a million thoughts, but the biggest thought I have is what you're basically saying is this codex is the fastest way to do the most amount of things, basically.

SPEAKER_00 10:19

Yes, it is. And it it got all the primitives right. And okay, actually, we can dive into uh some more of the reasons that like these are why I like codecs over certain tools. There's a lot of reasons I like it that these things are also in cursor and are in the cloud desktop app. Uh, but here are the things that only Codecs does, or Codex does better than all of them. Right? Um it is the only interface that does vibe coding and knowledge work in one platform. If you go to Cursor and ask for a doc, you know, it'll give you, it can like create HTML file and run it in the browser, but it can't just create a doc and let you view it like a cloud artifact in one interface. You can do this on Claude Desktop app, but again, you have to go to this code uh claude co-work feature. I'm not a fan of co-work at all. Um which may be a narrative violation on your channel. I don't know if you've been talking about Claude Cowork, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

I haven't, but I'm intrigued with Cloud Cowork. Personally, I I you know spend most of my time in Claude Code. But I was thinking of doing a full-on episode on like co-work because it's one of one of the questions I get asked the most, which is should I be using cowork and how how to best use it?

SPEAKER_00 11:34

But don't wouldn't you wish that Claude Code could just do what co-work could do from the same interface? Yes. Um yeah, and so to me, I don't see any good reason why you wouldn't allow Cloud Code to do the stuff that co work could do. Um and so that that's just my beef with Claude Cowork. And that's why I've been annoyed by it and I haven't made any videos on it, is because every time I try and use it, I run into some sort of like um limitation. Because the way that they set up the environment where the agents can do stuff, there's way more restrictions on cowork, which makes it super annoying to use, in my opinion. Anyway, um I think codec models are better at really complex tasks. And we actually we know this for sure. Uh we've tested this extensively as a team. You know, we're highly incentivized to uh write the best code and write it fastest for uh in the quickest amount of time, and codecs just does a better job with infrastructure with really hard tasks. I've one-shotted the other day, I one-shotted an app like Replit, a vibe coding tool that spun up sandboxes and you could vibecode web apps on your phone in one shot. It took an hour and 20 minutes to generate the code, and this was on 5.4. It's pretty impressive. So if you remember last year, OpenAI started working on Atlas. I thought it was kind of, I was just like, damn, they're kind of losing focus. They're you they're building this Atlas feature. Um, you know, it's a standalone browser, how many people are gonna use it? Well, recently they had like this big red alert at their company, and they decided to kind of push all of their efforts into one single app, which was Codex. And now what they're doing is they're just putting Atlas inside, they're basically putting Atlas inside like this is the Atlas browser. And I know this by interacting with people at OpenAI, this is gonna become a full web browser. So you're gonna be able to log in, it'll remember your login info. And so instead of having like a web browser with all of your tabs open, and you have to decide what task you need to use, instead, you'll start a chat with an AI, and the browser will be there right on the right, and you're you you'll you'll have different windows open for the specific task. And I think that's just a better way to do knowledge work, you know? Um and you can just open up tabs directly in the app that you're creating, whatever it is that you want to create, and you'll be able to open up Notion and you can download the Notion plugin, and so you can have your AI edit Notion and you'll have Notion open directly in the app, um, in the web browser, which I find to be pretty cool. Um and so that's another thing. They also have a built-in remotion plugin, and because their web browser is the best, you know, I created this video the other day. Oh boy, I've been doing a lot on here.

SPEAKER_01 14:20

Um and remotion for those people who don't know is what?

SPEAKER_00 14:25

So remotion, and by the way, in uh three hours I'll be launching a video on how to use codecs for remotion. Remotion turns code into videos. So you can create motion graphic videos with code. Well, guess what? Uh lucky luckily for you, AI will write all that code. So you can just create uh you can just type out what uh motion graphic scene you want and it will create it. And Claude, as many people in your audience know, Claude has gone on this massive run of launches every single day. And and by the way, it's reconnecting. I think Codex is getting a lot of load right now. Like there's just a lot of people using it.

SPEAKER_01 15:08

Because you're talking about it, you know? Yeah, talking about you're out there saying, you know, it's a super app, it's the best, you know, it's where you should be spending your time and you want to bet on OpenAI, and then all of a sudden it's reconnecting.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

Yeah, dude. I mean, what can I say? Um well I'll I'll try and be quiet before we shoot our next video. Um I'll just pin this. I ideally it'll just work in just a second. We don't need to show it for now. But the point is, you can generate really high-quality motion graphic videos, and Anthropic did this when they first started doing their product launches, they were just launching them with remotion videos. And it's really good for software products where you like have something happening on a user interface. It can generate the user interface, it can generate the motion. And the thing that's really cool about Codecs is you can just search the remotion plugin. And once you enable the remotion plugin, any chat that you use, you can say at remotion. And you can say at remotion, please create a video. And then I created another skill, which is is called Internet Image Puller. It doesn't just pull images, it pulls all of the assets for any given company from the internet. So it might work for 10 minutes, it'll pull all of a brand's assets, put it in an HTML file, and then Remotion or Codex can have all of that information for Remotion. So it can use your logo, it can use your colors, it can use your fonts in the video. You don't have to like manually tell it what to do. It'll just pull all of that information. And so that's a really fun way. And um, this is how we do a lot of our launch videos. And some have gotten over a million views. Uh, so this is a really useful thing. It was just really annoying to use with all of the other tools, but Codex is the only one where you can just at remotion and it opens directly in the app.

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Yeah, and you know, for for people who aren't super familiar with remotion, it's not just that it you know takes concepts and turns turns the videos into code or or you know, creates videos that are code. These videos are so high quality, it is actually insane. Like actually, like I've I know multiple people who've gone from zero to a hundred thousand Instagram followers by doing remotion videos. Um now they're high quality remotion videos and they go back and forth and back and forth. I'm not saying you one prompt it and you get the best possible videos, but these are is that remotion right here?

SPEAKER_00 17:40

Yeah, so this is seven, seven, like almost eight hundred thousand views. This is all remotion. You can't hear it, but like you can create motion graphic videos.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

And it's really easy to just like create pretty simple videos. And I think when you're doing a launch video, if it's a good idea, you should try and keep it as simple as possible, never have multiple things happening at once. Oh, okay, it just popped up. It's it's testing if it's running, but like this is what would run on the side of your screen, and it will in just a second. But it literally creates this like cap cut like timeline. And so this is uh, and so these are all of your compositions. And so here we have this demo that I made yesterday. Um and this was in one shot. And the reason why I was able to generate this in one shot is I actually have this thing called brand assets. Um, this contains all of the assets that uh I might want to use. And so once you've generated a video with all of your brand assets, you can just reference that to your AI and you can say, hey, please use this background, or use this component, or use this logo. And you notice here I just labeled all of these logos here. And so I can always say, like, please look at the brand assets, use the X logo, the YouTube logo, the TikTok logo, and the cursor logo, and put it in this video in this scene. And so if you just get everything that you might want to use in here, it's easy to tell your AI to use it later, if that makes sense. Anyway, you can create videos uh and you can open it right here in the browser, as you can see. That took a little bit because Codecs is running a little slow. But this is kind of like an everything app, which is which is pretty cool. And then to uh to finalize why I use it over other ones is the computer use is better. It is faster than any computer use that I've used before. And this means you download computer use as part of Codex. It can literally control your computer. Not only can it control your computer, it can control multiple of your apps at the same time, which is a mind-blowing experience. And you can see the mouse moving around on your device. I had it controlling Canva yesterday. It was moving around pretty fast, controlling Canva, it exported the right document, and it fed it back into Codecs. It was a really fun workflow, and that's just a really cool experience. I highly recommend trying this just to kind of see where AI is at in terms of computer use. And then, as I talked about earlier, it can control the browser that's directly inside Codecs. So, pretty soon we'll live in a world where an AI will be able to go to any site, open the browser, you're gonna be logged in, so it'll have all of your login information. It'll be a full browser like Atlas, and it will be able to take any action. So there will be basically no limitation to what it can do. And then they release this new chronicle feature so that it kind of like remembers everything. So it'll kind of, and this one might have some privacy stuff that you might want to look into if you're super big on privacy. This is my work computer, and I like testing stuff too much, so I had to enable it. But it basically watches your screen for context so you don't have to explain yourself again. It just kind of knows what you're working on and it stores these as like little codex memories, and it allows you to stay in flow. So you can move chats around. You don't really need to be that organized. The AI will just kind of have context over what you're doing. And these are kind of the main reasons I really like uh codecs.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

I didn't know about Chronicle, first time I've ever heard of that. Is it worth it? I I know there's privacy issues and security issues. I know the comment section is gonna not love it. But from a productivity standpoint, are you seeing meaningful uptick?

SPEAKER_00 21:33

So I they released it two days ago. So I'm not gonna lie, there's been way too many things to test. But if you go to personalization and you scroll down and go to Chronicle, uh, I recommend learning more. This is not an endorsement. I'm using a work laptop. I test everything. I go unlimited permissions, I don't care about the privacy stuff. I'm testing everything. That's what I do. I love it too much. So by no means am I telling you to do this and that it's worth the risk. I have no idea what the risk is. Um, but you should look into it because it is an interesting technology at the very least, right? Having an AI, assuming it's secure and everything, having an AI that understands what you're working on so that when you type something, it knows exactly what you're referencing. That is inherently useful. Whether or not it works really well, I'm it's up for debate. I haven't tested it long enough. You know, it came out two days ago.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

So what else do I need to know? Like because I'm downloading codecs for the first time. So what are things in terms of setup? Uh remotion I'm gonna add, uh projects I understand, uh plugins.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Um yeah. So yeah, let's talk about plugins. So plugins, you know, there's a lot of words right now. Um people talk about MCPs, they talk about plugins, they talk about skills, they talk about integrations, connectors, right? You have all of these words. And if I'm being honest, the difference between them is very blurry, right? Just kind of I clump all of those words together and I just call them skills. Um, it just makes sense in my brain, right? You have an AI agent by default that's really smart, it can search the web, it can it can create apps, but if you don't give it any skills, then it's it's only gonna be a generic model. What you need to do is you need to give your agent access to the tools that you already use to make it useful for your workflows. And so here they call them plugins, and again, skills and plugins. You can create your own skill. You actually can't build your own plugin unless you get it approved by OpenAI. So that's kind of the difference. Plugins are more official. Um, and so one of the plugins that