Ultimate Guide To ChatGPT Codex for Everyday People transcript

This is Chat GPT Codex. Right now, it's one of the most powerful AI tools available, and I know it has the word code in it, and it did start as a coding app, but it could do a whole lot more now. And just about anyone watching this video is going to be able to use it. You don't actually need to know anything about coding in order to get a lot out of this app. So, how is Codex different? Well, instead of just being a chatbot, Codex could actually do the work for you.

It could handle knowledge work and it could also do coding tasks at the same time in the same chat. And the unique thing about it is it works inside of folders on your own computer. And it could connect to the apps that you already use like Gmail and Slack, and it could even take over your computer and do certain tasks inside of different apps. So, in this video, I want to show you exactly how it works. I want to show you exactly how to set it up the right way, the app itself.

And I want to show you lots of different use cases that I have that is going to make it worth your time, and I'll include the prompts that I use as well. So, the first thing is you need to download the Codex app. Right now, it's not included in the Chat GPT experience on the web or if you have the Chat GPT app. Just go to this website link that I'll put below in the description. It's just on the chat.openai.com website.

Now, I have a brand new install of Codex here. Once you install it, it may ask you some questions to personalize the experience for you. And on the left panel here, it's going to feel like Chat GPT a little bit. You could start a new chat from here, and there's some other things that we're going to cover in this video like sites and plugins and automations and projects here, and your recent chats will show up here. But, let me show you the center of this for a second because what this does is actually uses the files on your computer and creates files on your computer.

The best way to organize everything inside of Codex is something called project. So, if you click this right here, you typically want to start from scratch. So, that allows you to create a folder on your own computer. Now, the way I like to work with it is I like to pretty much isolate everything I do inside of those projects and not really cross-contaminate different projects. It just keeps things a lot more organized as you use this more and more.

So, you'll press start from scratch right here and create your first project. Now, for this very first project on our first demo, I'm going to turn a bunch of different receipts I have into a really nice presentable Excel dashboard. So, a lot of us have to do this to make expense reports, for example. So, I'll start here. The few other things before we go on with this project is you'll see some few other settings that appear.

One is says work locally. So, this is what I typically like to do. This works on your own computer. But, you can actually connect this to CodeX Web if you want to go beyond just working locally on your own computer. But, that's kind of the power of it. I like to work this way. And then you'll see some other important options inside of the chat box right here. The first one is this one that's really important to understand.

So, this is based on permissions that you're willing to give to CodeX. Now, CodeX is called an AI agent. So, it will do things for you. Well, sometimes you want to make sure you kind of hold its hand, right? You don't want to give it free rein to do whatever it wants because it does have access to folders on your computer, but that's only if you give it access. So, let me show you how it works. So, the way it goes to work right now is only has access to that project or that folder that I created.

It can't go beyond that right now. But, it also, as it goes to work, is going to ask you for approval always when it's using external files, editing, or using the internet. You could ask it to approve for me. So, this only ask for action that are potentially unsafe. I think this is great for most people. And then you could give it full access, unrestricted access to the internet and any file on your computer. If you're watching a beginner's guide to Codex, I highly recommend you don't choose this one and choose this instead.

On this side, you could choose your chat GPT model that is driving this. Now, I didn't mention this, but this Codex is available for free. Everyone has access to it. But, it is usage-based. The more you use it, it's going to use up credits. And then at some point, it's going to give you a pop-up that you ran out of credits and you need to pay more for a higher plan. Now, the reasoning efforts the chat GPT models, if you don't know anything about that, basically the higher the reasoning is, right now 5.5 is the best model, but you know, new models come out all the time.

So, that is going to pick that for you by default. But, the reasoning effort depends on how complex of a task you're doing. Typically, I just have a set to high because extra high will use up a lot more credit. You could also alter the speed. So, right now it's set to fast, 1.5 the normal speed, but again, that's going to use up more credit. So, that is totally based on your plan, how much you're paying, and how much you're going to use this.

If you want to keep things on the lower side, standard speed is good with high reasoning effort. And obviously, you always want to use the very best chat GPT model available, which is 5.5 for just about anything that you do. Now, when you do create those projects, they typically appear in your documents folder and they look like this. They just look like a folder on your computer. Now, the next thing I did is I put these receipts here in side of this folder so it could access it.

Now, remember there was a permission where you could access your whole computer. Now, that's the ultimate superpower of this app if you do give it that kind of permission because you don't have to then put those receipts into that folder. They could be scattered all over the place and it could capture the different things it needs from those different folders like your download folder or your desktop. But right now, I want to keep it self-contained and organized, so I put everything manually into this folder.

Now, I'm going to ask you to read all the receipt images, pull out all the vendor names, dates, the total for each, and build me a cell sheet with a simple dashboard that shows me my spending by category here. Now, if you haven't access your whole computer, you have to tell us specifically where to look if you want it to work faster. A lot of times, you bring down your usage by being very clear in your prompt. And by the way, if you press the plus sign here, you can add files and folders directly from here, and it still use the project folder to create things inside of that folder.

And there is more things like plugins, which is access to different apps that we're going to get into in a second. Right now, I'm going to go ahead and send out this prompt right here. Now, as you could see, Codex is going to go to work, and you could kind of watch it work, go through his thinking process. It creates steps for itself, so it's got to go through these four steps here. So, sometimes I just let this go, and I go on about doing something else on the web, or just using Chat GPT for a different task.

In just a couple minutes, it's created what we asked for, and it's asking me to open this in Excel. It actually created an Excel file, so I'm going to press open in Excel. And here is our Excel file. So, this is the dashboard it created, and here's the spreadsheet. So, it pulled in exactly what I asked for, the vendor, the date, the total, the category, and it took about 2 minutes to do this. When I used to travel for work, I used to do this all the time manually, and it definitely took a whole lot longer than 2 minutes, and I actually never had the skills in Excel to make dashboards.

I pretty much just was able to do something like this, and then send it out. And if you go back to that folder here, where we had our receipts, you'll see a new document was created called output, and then within that, you could see that Excel sheet that it created here, and you could see this dashboard was also saved as a PNG. Something I didn't ask for, but obviously really useful to have things like this. So, that's a very basic example to show you how this Codex app actually works.

And I have lots of different examples for you, and we're going to also get into plugins, how memory works, and some more advanced things towards the end of the video. And my team and I put together a free guide just for this video, specially focused on getting the most out of Codex. It actually includes five copy and paste prompts for everyday business task. That includes things like creating entire briefs, data clean up that I'm showing you here, some of my prompts there, workflow audits, and you'll find the prompts really practical and easy to use, specially for Codex.

I'll put a link in the description, so you could access that guide completely for free. Now, actually let me get into the memory explanation here on how this works. Because with Codex, you actually don't have to explain things over and over again. So, they have some things called skills that we're going to talk about in a bit, but it also has long-term and short-term memory that I want to explain here. So, there is a file inside of Codex called agents.md.

So, think of this file as your onboarding document if you were hiring a real assistant, right? You want to give them as much context as possible. So, every time you start a new chat or create a new project, Codex could actually read that file first, so it already knows things about you, about who you are, and things that you want to get done. Now, in this case, I'm going to create a agents.md file specifically for a project.

Now, you could create a new project from here. Remember that I'm a YouTube creator. I'm going to have all my spreadsheets color coded by priority. If I write code, I want it done in Python here. So, anything you specifically want or want it to know about you, just say that. Or you could actually have the interview format where you say, "Interview me, and then ask me 10 questions to learn all about this project." Or you could have a general agents.md file.

And if you send this out here, it creates this file typically in that project folder if you chose one, or if you didn't choose one, it will just remember that long-term. So, when it does create it, if I click on it, it basically is system instructions or back-end instructions for how this agent should behave. And you could see that right here. So, it says I'm a YouTube creator here, and it gave it more information than I actually had in my prompt here, the coding preferences laid out here, the spreadsheet that I had, and the working style.

And it's pretty short. You could have these be much, much longer. And by default, it will actually know how to keep its instructions like this one, like the agents.md. Now, this also has an automatic memory where it quietly learns from your past chats over time, but you generally don't actually need to touch that or even see where it's at. That will do that in the background. Now, for this next demo, I actually want to show you one of my favorite ways to use these AI type of agents like Codex.

Claude has another one that does this type of work called Claude Co-work. So, if you have messy folders on your computer, like a downloads folder, you almost never have the time to figure out what's going on in your downloads folder, right? So, I'm going to have this take care of that for me with this prompt. Look at every file in the download/mess folder. This is just a folder I just made, but figure out which client each one belongs to, what it is, name it or rename it clearly, sort it by different folders for different clients, and give me a nice folder structure, right?

So, now you're going to give it access to go do things on your computer and move things around in different folders. And in this one, I actually already have that folder, so I'm going to say choose an existing folder, and that's the folder, and I'll open that folder here, and this is what that folder looks like right now before it's done, and I'll show you what happens after it's done. This is the file structure that it created for us.

So, let's go over here and this was the messy download folder. Let me go back into it. And now, it's nicely organized and things are renamed with the date. But, it kept every single file I had in that folder. It just restructured it in the way I wanted organized. And if you look right here, this is the folder structure and it looks exactly that way on my own computer. Now, for the next use case, I'll show you how it actually works with PDFs because a lot of times we need to extract information like we did with the receipts, but we need to do it with PDFs.

I have a lot of PDFs invoices, for example, here and I ask it to pull the invoice number, the dates, and so on. Okay, so we got ourselves another spreadsheet here and this time it extracted from PDFs. Turning invoices into a spreadsheet something a lot of us still have to do to this day manually. Again, this did it in just a couple minutes. Okay, let's go to the next stage of this which goes well beyond what I'm showing you so far because this becomes a super app when you actually start using these things called plugins and then something called skills.

Plugins connect your ChatGPT Codex into all the different apps you already use. You just got to give it permission, typically one app at a time. If any of them show up right here as added, that's because your ChatGPT account already had access. Now, Codex get access by default here. And you'll see some things like computer use. This can control your computer's apps with Codex. You'll see Chrome. This could control Chrome with Codex and browse the web.

You'll have to give it individual access to some of these. Now, Gmail, obviously, calendar, your entire Google Drive, those are some of my favorite ways to give it access. But again, remember, you are giving it access to go read, write, and sometimes delete files on the things you're giving it access to. So, definitely be careful. Be very elaborate with your prompt to give it very specific details so you don't burn through credits very quickly.

But the Gmail app for example, in order to add an app, I uninstall this one but you just have to press add right here. This will install the plugin or the connector. I'm on a business plan, that's why it says approved by your admin here. So if you're in a business plan, you may need to get permission but on a plus plan, it should be done by default. This is something I've been using AI for for quite a while. So all you have to do is type in the ad mention sign and you could bring individual plugins like this or individual apps like this.

In this case, I'm going to bring in that plugin right here and I just ask it to look through my inbox. I give it access to my Google account that is associated with this business here and find any sponsorships here that send me emails and research them and put them in table format. And I'm going to reduce this to high. Typically, that should be fine for this one. And by the way, I forgot to switch projects. So if you don't switch projects, it creates it within the other project.

In this case, it doesn't matter all that much but you could always go to the chat option and start a chat from here if you don't need it to be inside of a projects. And in this case, it gave it to me right inside of chat because I asked it for a table but I didn't say give me a table in an Excel document. So you could actually use this like you would use chat GPT and not always create things. That also reduces your credit usage.

In this case, I just wanted to quickly glance through that and this is what I ended up getting which is perfectly fine. I don't actually need to create a document from it. Now let me show you something called skills. One of my favorite ways to actually use any AI tool. If you also use Claude, you might have come across skills before. But if I go to plugins and let's say I want to create PowerPoint presentations, right?

One of the things you'll see is the plugins but the other thing you'll see is called skills. Let me just click on this one to show you what it does. What skills are are basically recipes. You are saving the recipe so chat GPT or Claude or any other AI tool that uses skills could refer back to it. This is enabled by default right here. I could always disable a skill and I could always open it to read it, but the skill is the set of instructions for how a presentation should be created.

And as you could see, they are usually super elaborate. Well, most likely no one sat down and wrote this skill word by word. best way to create it is by actually having a back and forth conversation with chat GPT and then when you get to a point where you really love the output, say save that as a skill and it will save that as a skill. So, inside of a new chat if I type in slash, you'll see I could bring in ton of different things inside of my chat here inside of Codex.

Skill will be on the bottom and there's ton of different skills already available in my account. A lot of them I've actually created myself. A lot of them come from my chat GPT account, but you could bring any of them into chat. Now, a lot of them are enabled so if it needs to use it, most likely it will, but if I specifically wanted to bring in a presentation and use that skill, especially if I made one myself, that's how you bring a skill into chat and then your prompt will be to create a presentation and then it will follow every set of instruction that skill document has.

I'm working on a very detailed skills video because inside of Claude is very relevant, inside of Codex is very relevant, inside of pretty much every AI tool is becoming more and more relevant. AI agents use skills that you could custom create. So, I'll get into that a little bit later, but just wanted to show you that's how easy it is to create skills and to bring them inside of a chat conversation. Now, one of the best parts of Codex is Remember, you could do knowledge work.

You could also do coding. You could also generate images, right? ChatGPT has right now the very best model when it comes to generating images. I could type in a prompt like, "Create three product photos someone wearing a custom knitted sweater in a professional studio. I want it in PNG format." And it created those three images for us and it saved it to our download folder here. So, that's the three that I could use.

And then I could then, with a follow-up prompt, ask it to maybe put that in a thumbnail for me or create some kind of design or sell for me here for an ad I'm running, for example. So, remember, you are inside of a chatbot, so you can actually have a follow-up to keep building on this, which I haven't really shown you. I've shown you one-off tasks where you send a prompt, you get an output, but you could just continue this conversation till you get exactly what you want and reiterate, which is especially useful with an AI image model that's also an AI agent inside of Codex.

Next, let me show you one of the best parts of using Codex, which is something called computer use. That's when Codex could actually take over your screen, move your mouse around, click on things, and even type for you and use the apps on your computer. And you could also do this with the browser. So, if you didn't turn it on already, you just have to go to plugins and you'll have to turn on computer use. And I usually turn on the Chrome use with that, too.

So, this controls Chrome, so it could open up browser on your computer and do things for you. Let me go back to this previous chat here and I'll type out this prompt. And you could type in the at mention sign and bring in computer use like this. You could choose this plugin here. And my prompt is going to be to open Canva, start a new presentation, and put each of the images we just made into their own slide as a follow-up conversation here.

And I'll send this out. So, you'll see something like this. In the case where Canva is not installed on my computer and needs the browser, it will go use the browser, but it did first check if I have that app installed. So, if I had Photoshop, for example, it will try to do something in Photoshop, which I haven't had a lot of luck with, but in this case, it gave me something. Elevator risk allowed Codex to use Google Chrome.

So, I will allow it access. Now, at this point, I'm hands-off. It actually opened a new tab. It went to the Canva website here, and from this point, it'll do everything on its own. Now, computer use right now, and the browser use right now, is pretty slow. So, I don't really find it as useful. It's an option that just keeps getting better and better. It's been around for sometimes with different parts of ChatGPT, but this is still a little bit gimmicky.

I'll let this finish up here. I'll show you the results in a bit. Okay, it finally finished the three-slide presentation. It opened Canva. It imported the images. It created this slideshow here. And obviously, I could take it from there. But for the amount of credits you use here, and for how slow it is, I don't find it very practical, but it's really impressive the first time you see it at work, and I think this is going to be the future of AI.

It's just not quite there yet. Next, I want to show you automations, which is probably one of the best parts of Codex, where you could do things on a schedule. So, you could let it go to work while you're sleeping. Some of the really popular ones are this daily brief, a weekly review, a project monitor. So, I'll just show you this one as an example. So, this sets up an automation that gives a morning brief each day, and it will do things based on what's on my calendar, what emails I haven't read yet, and anything that needs my attention.

Now, this one, you really want to give it access to a lot of different connectors, if you're comfortable with that, because these automations don't really work well if they don't have context from your actual life, right? You want to give it information that is relevant to you. Now, automations I'm working on an entirely separate video, so I'll make that as a part two with some other things that I'm saving for a part two.

This one I wanted to still keep it relatively short, but definitely check out the automations tab and if you go to view templates, you'll see a whole lot more of them over here. And then in my follow-up video, I'll show you these in action. Next, I want to briefly show you the coding ability. This is after all called Codex and it's one of the best coding AI tools available right now. So, there's a couple of different options.

You could build sites with something that have sites. You could create new site and it will build a site with basically that site skill or you could just type in a prompt here to build you real working apps here. And these could run actually on your computer too and you could publish them with more advanced settings. So, if I type in a prompt like this to create a modern professional website for a video production company and give it a little bit of more context, I could go ahead and send this out and this will go ahead and create that website for me.

Now, while our website is getting built, I want to show you the slash command. If you just type in slash on your keyboard, these different options that I showed you a few of are really useful. One of my favorite ones is this personality option where you could change the personality on how this responds to you. You could also build skills and bring in those skills to change the tone and the personality of Codex. The other one that's really useful is this option right here called pet.

So, if you bring in the pet, it will just create this little pet in the corner that shows you everything that you got going on to notify you when a task is done. So, while I'm building this website for example, you could see this is going to work and then the pet will notify me. So, this is something I would turn on if you are going to create things, specially mini apps or entire websites here. Just have the pet so then you could do other things, use Codex with a new chat and then the pet will remind you here with this little check mark when something is ready.

Okay, after a bit of time, it created a website and it also gave me the link. Let me show you you link right here and this is the website that it created for us. Now, I didn't give it a lot of context. I didn't give it a business name, but just kind of show you the style of it. You also created this background image. It looks very, very professional. I obviously want to give a YouTube links or Vimeo links here to replace some of these videos here, but overall, a really fantastic looking webpage with multiple different links to different sections of it that I asked for.

By the way, if you go to the settings section right here, you could look at your usage remaining. So, you usually get a usage for every 5-hour block, and you also have a weekly, but you also typically have a reset option depending on what plan you have that will reset both your 5-hour limit and your weekly limit, but you only get a couple of these typically, but I did use that reset to actually make this website with our business plan and some of the other prompts that I showed you throughout this video.

It did require one reset. Now, for part two, I'm going to get more advanced where we cover more things related to plugins and automations and some more coding example to show you the coding possibility that you have with Codex. Again, make sure you grab that free guide that I linked below in the description that I created with my team on exactly how to get the most out of Codex with prompts included. And if you haven't check out the video I made on Cloud Code, I'll put that video over here.

It's similar to Codex for coding.