Only 1 in 1,600 People Use Codex. Here's How to Catch Up.

I'm obsessed with Codex right now in the way a kid is obsessed with a new PlayStation. I keep wanting to kind of grab people and say, "No, no, no. You have to see what this thing just did." Because Codeex is not just giving me better AI answers. It's making my computer feel different. It's my files. It's my browser. It's my folders and drafts and screenshots. And they're all belonging to Codeex now, right? It's all of my weird little systems and the stuff I usually have to manually connect all by myself. Codeex moves across all of that. And that is why my token dashboard has gotten ridiculous lately. Not because I'm chatting more, but because I'm handing Codeex bigger jobs. Before Codeex, a lot of my AI work still ended up looking like chat. Unless it was code, right? Draft this, summarize this, clean this up, help me think through this. And it was really useful, but it was still basically me asking for help. And with codeex, I started doing something else. I started giving my computer jobs. find the transcript, read the folder, compare the versions, render the word file, check that it opens, open the browser, use the site, keep going until there's something real for me to inspect. And that is why Codeex is blowing my mind, not because it writes code, but because it makes the computer feel like something I can hand work to. My files and drafts are all now in range for codec. More and more of anything I do on the computer is now work I can hand to an agent in plain English. And this is the part I want to unpack because I think people are going to bounce off this tool for the wrong reason. This is not a take aside video. I am not asking you to join team open AI. This is just a deep dive into why codeex works for me. Why I'm fired up about it and what I've learned from using it hard enough that has actually changed my day. And if you haven't used it, because the word codeex sounds like code, that's exactly why you ought to stay with me here. The name is bad. Honestly, it sounds like a developer tool, but it's not only a developer tool. Developers are seeing it first because coding has a really clean working environment that made it easy for codecs to engage. It has clean tests and files and diffs and logs and codecs can engage with that. But the habit codeex teaches is much bigger than code. If you write, if you research, if you make documents or Excel spreadsheets or if you run a tiny business or if you organize projects or build side projects or manage content or spend your day just switching apps or even opening a dozen Chrome tabs, the important thing is not that Codeex can write software. The important thing is that Codeex can help you get all of that work done on the computer you already have and use. And yes, it's for Windows 2 now. So, I'm going to show you how I'm actually using it. I'm going to show you the chief of staff thread. I'm going to show you goals, multiple threads, computer use, plugins, skills, drafting several artifacts at once, using websites, checking work, and turning repeated corrections into workflows that I can reuse. And if you're already using codecs, I want I want to hear what I'm missing. I'm still learning this in public with you. If something I show you helps, or if you have a better way to run it, stick it in the comments. Let's make this a learning thread. This is early enough that the real playbook is still being written by the people who push the tool hard. On May 20th, my local codeex log showed 510 million tokens in one day. And I know that that sounds completely insane. And this is under this is not all of my AI tokens, by the way. This is just under my Codeex Max account. I'm not talking about a surprise billing story here. I'm not paying extra for this. The point is that the way I'm using my computer is changing completely. And I think we're sleeping on it. And I want to tell you about it. more of my computer stopped being appby manual work and started running through agents. It is now at the point where most of the work I do on my computer is through agents and codecs. It's not through apps directly. And when I go to apps, I feel like it's a hassle, right? My files, my browser sessions, my documents, my code, my terminal output, all of it is getting routed through codecs. And the number of tokens is not the point. Don't wake up and say, well, Nate said burn half a billion tokens. That would be a dumb target. The number matters because it shows that the computer itself is changing. We have been computing for decades using bits and bytes and now we're moving to tokens and this is the biggest shift in that and I can prove it. I mapped my token burn back over a year. It is very clear behaviorally that the biggest shift in token burn has been over the last month or so as computer use plus 5.5 in codecs have unlocked a huge amount of my workflows at once. So when I talk about the token burn I'm not saying look at this giant number half a billion tokens 800 million tokens whatever it is it sounds crazy if that only meant I was typing more prompts it would be really embarrassing but that's not what's happening here. The number went up because the unit of work fundamentally changed in scale. I stopped asking AI only for answers and I started asking codecs to carry more of the job. Go find the source files. Go read the transcript. Go make the artifact. Go render the document. Go check the package. Go inspect the browser. Go keep working till the goal gets done. And so the chart reflects that. So when I say codeex has helped me 10x parts of my workflow, I don't just mean I became 10x smarter. I mean the size of the job I'm willing to hand to the machine changed. So the chart isn't a scoreboard. It's not there to sort of make a vanity metric out of. It's just a receipt that reflects the way work has changed. So the first piece here, what is the compute model? What is changing? For most of our lives, computers have been application first and that was considered a big deal. I remember back when it was DOSs and the app was a huge revolution in computing, right? because the app was a unit of work and and I could write a document without writing code in the 1990s when documents became a thing. I I I could actually open a browser. I remember Netscape Navigator. I I could open a spreadsheet and do the work. And that was a huge productivity improvement. The human moved between the apps. The human remembered why each app was open. The the whole computing experience was built around the human first. I made a Tik Tok recently where I pointed out that my computer feels like it belongs to codeex as much as to me now because sometimes I can't use it because it's burning literally a 100 million tokens an hour and you can hear it hissing in the background. It's burning tokens while I record this and I can't use it because it's literally at max memory capacity. But I don't mind that because it's doing 10 things at once for me and I can't do 10 things at once. I just can give out assignments and then I go take a walk and I touch grass and I come back and I've got 10 things done. So we are building the computing paradigm differently now. It's the first change in the computing paradigm in like 40 years. We're moving from a world where humans were the center of the computing paradigm to where humans sit above the computing paradigm and we delegate to agents who run the compute for us. So codeex is a way into the future. I'm not saying codeex is the only answer that we'll ever get here. I just want to underline that. I am not saying Anthropic won't get here. I know that they will. Primitives like files and source notes and and templates and applications themselves. They're all underneath codecs. Codec can drive all of them with agents. You essentially have a state machine in codeex, which is a fancy way of saying you have a agent in a loop that remembers what it's doing in codeex that can work the whole computer. Tokens are the cost of letting the agent compute for you. And the more of your work that runs through agents, the more your computer activity becomes token activity. And so that is the simplest answer for how I get to a half a billion tokens a day. And by the way, if you're like, "Oh, well that was an anomaly." No, it's not an anomaly. I'm easily doing 300, 400, 500 million tokens a day these days. And I don't even try that hard. And I feel like I could do more if I wanted to, but the point is not to burn tokens. The point isn't to be wasteful. The point is to make an active layer between your intent and the machine so the active layer can start to scale for you. The intelligence can scale for you. The first thing that made codeex click for me was this. I stopped treating every thread like a random chat. Most people use AI like a pile of separate conversations. One chat for a draft, one chat for a bug, one chat for a note, one chat for a random question. And the problem is that the human becomes the router. You have to remember where everything is. You have to remember what matters. You have to remember what the next move was. You remember what version was current. You remember what standard the work is supposed to meet. That does not scale very well because our brains get tired. The better pattern is to create one thread that stays pointed at the work. It knows the goal. It knows the folders. It knows the current artifacts. It knows the standard. And then it can help you spin out smaller jobs without making you reexplain the entire project every time. And that is what I mean by a chief of staff thread. It's not magic memory. You still have to give it sources. You still have to correct it. You still have to make it show receipts. But once you start using codecs this way, it stops feeling like a chatbot and starts feeling like a home base for the work. The next thing that changed my usage was getting more serious about goals and threads. And this sounds really small until you use it on a real project. If I ask a normal chatbot for help, it will often stop when it has produced something that looks like an answer. Codeex becomes much more useful when I give it the actual objective. Not help me with this, but more like read these sources, produce this artifact, check it against this standard, and do not stop at the first plausible draft. Keep going. That changes the relationship. Now, I am not asking for a response. I'm just assigning a job out. A thread is not one agent doing every step by itself. Codeex can still use sub agents for smaller tasks, but the useful pattern looks more it looks bigger, right? A thread is the run that owns the job and a sub aent is just a smaller helper inside that job. You use it for a narrow piece of work so the main thread does not get buried in noise. So one thread can plan the goal and that planning thread can use sub agents for discovery and source checking and scouting and reading through messy material. And then when the goal is cleaner I can send that goal to another thread to execute. The execution thread can own the deliverable but it can still use sub aents inside the job. One sub agent might scout a site, another might check sources, another might inspect output, another might summarize a noisy folder. The thread owns the job as a whole. The sub agents just handle contained pieces of the job. Once you understand that as a concept, thread mode stops looking like a bunch of chats and starts looking like a way to separate planning and execution and checking the work. And the nice thing is with the chief of staff pattern, you can get a lot of this managed just by talking to your chief of staff. You don't have to assign out these work to individual agents. That's not how it works anymore. The thing that makes codeex powerful is not one magic prompt. It is the setup around the model. Computer use is literal. It can see a screen. It can click. It can type. It can use an app. Tools let it call real systems. Plugins and connectors let it reach the places where your work already lives. Skills let you teach it a reusable way to do a job instead of explaining the same process every single time. And that last part matters so much. If I correct codeex once, that's just a chat that I had. If I turn the correction into a skill, into a checklist, into a reusable instruction, the work begins to compound. And this is where that code label becomes really misleading. Developers understand this first because they already live in a world where there's tools and files and tests and workflows. That same pattern of work applies now to documents and reports and research and invoices and dashboards and meeting prep and family logistics and customer support. All of it is using code patterns to get better with codecs. If the work lives on your computer, codeex can start to help you get that work done using those patterns it learned from code and you don't have to know code to do it. The sample codeex workflow that I think is big enough that I want to get into with you today is a workflow that essentially provides you a heads up dashboard for all of your work day. Like imagine a world where instead of buying some SAS that you know has a defined amount of work that says you have to plug into your Slack and you have to plug into your email and this and that and it doesn't produce everything. You can make an exact headsup display that gives you live alerts of what matters in your workplace that's customtuned to your tools. You can do it now. It's not that hard. All you have to do is take the time to go into Codeex and tell Codeex one all about the sources that you use to do work. So the email, the Slack, the WhatsApp messages, the carrier pigeon messages, whatever it is that you use to do work. And then you say those are all my sources. Two, this is what matters to me. This is how I move the needle in my job. And then have a really honest discussion with codeex about that. And talk about how you refer to some of the sources, maybe all of the sources at different points. What is salient? What matters about the information in these sources? And then next you say, "Okay, I want you to design for me a dashboard that is live updatable based on the sources you can pull from via computer use or maybe via MCP server. Some of them are via MCP server. Slack has an MCP server skill. Some they'll use computer use in the browser and that's fine." and say, "Design me a dashboard just for me." That is my personal heads up display for work. So, I can look at it and I can say at any given point, I know what matters in Slack. I know what matters in email. I know what I have to do. I know what my prioritize list is. And I can go and get it. And it's not something that someone built with a seed round and a bunch of VC money. You built it just for you in a way that works for you with your data. And Codeex can do that today. And yes, I have the complete readout on that on Substack. You can actually see examples of that over my shoulder here as I'm talking because we went through and we built it. It's really fun. It helps you to understand what a big loop can be. It helps you to understand automations because you can actually start to build an automation that updates this every 15 minutes, every half hour. It's kind of up to you. It will check through all those data sources. It will run the salency analysis to see what really matters. It will come back and say, "This is what I think matters. This is how I rejig the priority and this is what I want to emphasize as really important for work. It becomes your headquarters for work every day and you custom built it. Isn't that cool? I think that's really cool. That's an example of an open loop you can build. That has never been something that we could make before. That wasn't something we could make even two or three months ago because as cool as the models were and as much as we're into the longrunning Agentic Revolution, we didn't have the compute availability and we did not have the computer use availability to get that unlocked. And so I picked this because it shows something that only Codeex can do today. I'm sure other models will come along and do it soon. And Codex will go and do that work, especially if you use the set a goal feature. The set a goal feature is really handy because it basically zeros in codecs on the goal you define and it will just run through walls until it gets to that gets to that done state. And I love that because I want to have agents that don't stop early. Remember when we talked about the Ralph Wiggum loop and it was like January and February and we were all excited because Claude was stopping on agent loops but Ralph made Claude keep going. You don't need to do that with codeex. You set a goal and it just keeps going. It's great. If you're new to Codeex, do not begin by trying to automate your whole life. Just pick one loop that is annoying and valuable. Something like, "Turn this transcript into a brief. Organize this source folder. Build me a simple dashboard to track my inbound email subscriptions." Whatever it is. Prepare my day from calendar, email, and Slack. Draft three versions of this document and explain the difference. Check this package. Tell me what's missing. I can give you a bunch more. Right? Then give Codeex five things. Give it a goal. Give it sources. Give it a standard. Give it a permission boundary. And give it the proof that it's done. That's the most basic way to set up a loop. It's not a fancy prompt. It's not a hack. You're just setting a loop up. A real assignment with real sources and a way to check the results. And if you're already using codecs, this is the level you go to next. Look for the loops you keep repeating. Every time you find yourself giving the same correction or writing the same setup note or asking for the same kind of review or checking the same kind of output, then ask whether that should become a skill. Ask whether it should become a standing workflow, an automation. Ask whether it should become a memory for Codeex. And that is when it stops being one-off help and starts becoming something where Codeex is evolving with you to accomplish the work you want done through a series of automated loops. When I say codeex is blowing my mind, I do not mean I want agents running around my life without rules. I mean the opposite. The more powerful the tool gets, the more important the boundaries get. Don't paste API keys or passwords into the chat, right? Learn to use AENV file. It's not hard and it keeps secrets out of the prompt. That's just one example, right? Or don't give it write access just because read access would be useful. Don't let it send and publish and delete or spend money unless you really understand the workflow. And when it produces something important, make it show the receipts. This is why Codeex is interesting to me. It's not just that it's powerful, it's that it's very easy to inspect the work. It will show you the files and the logs and the tests and the renders and the command output. And you can build a habit of getting proof from your agent around it. And that's what keeps this from turning into a bunch of hype and wishful thinking. The tool matters because it lets you hand off more work responsibly. And the skill is learning to do that without getting sloppy. The reason I wanted to make this video is simple. Codeex is changing how I work and I don't think the story is only for developers. Look, I'm not asking you to pick a side in a platform fight between OpenAI and Enthropic. I'm saying just pay attention to what Codeex lets you practice and see if it's useful. If you do knowledge work, if you write, if you research, if you manage projects, if you build documents, if you run support, when you plan your life, or when you spend your day moving between apps, this app matters to you. This app will make a difference for you. Codex is one of the first tools that lets you practice a new kind of computer literacy, the computer literacy of the future. not typing, not prompting, but handing work to agents that can truly use the computer and then learning how to check what came back. That's why I built the token dashboard. That's why I'm using this thing so much. That's why I wanted this to be a real deep dive instead of a quick reaction. If you want the checklist and the examples and the setup notes, I put the practical version of all of this to get started on the Substack. And there's an active community there that's already building with Codeex that you can check into. We have a whole Slack. It's amazing. But I also want the comment section to be useful here. If you're using codecs, tell me how. If you have a better workflow, I want to see it. If one of these tricks helps, tell me which one. This is still early enough that people who use the tool hard are learning from each other in public. And I want you guys to be the cool kids. Show me you're the cool kids and show me what you're building. This is why it feels exciting. This is this is a moment when computing is changing. And Codeex is at the at the forefront of that. Codex is the tip of the spear on that. So, show me what you're building in the comments. I'll see you next time. I'm so excited to see what you're building with Codex.