Codex Can Control Your Computer - The Ultimate Productivity Tool

OpenAI recently released a dedicated Codecx app, and a part of that is a feature called computer use. And I am convinced this is the feature of automation. This allows Codex to control anything and everything on your computer with your permission of course. This video is sponsored by Hey Polo. Now most people that know of Codex think of it as ChatGPT's answer to Claude Code and it's coding plat form. It's coding specific platform. But it can do so much more than that. It is an automation and productivity tool. Now, the computer use feature of Codex, which is what I'm mainly focused on in this video, was created by the team that formerly worked on workflow, which became shortcuts, which when they left Apple, they created an app called Sky, which never actually got a public release because it was acquired by OpenA I. Now I'm gonna go through a few examples of how I have been using computer use in my everyday. These are real-world examples of what I've been doing with it, not just like demo projects that you kind of see in a lot of AI videos. So to get started with computer use, you need to install the codex app not the chat gpt app but the c odex app uh and i will link to everything in the description below uh once you have the codex app inst alled you're gonna come over here to plugins and you're gonna w makeanna sure you have computer use inst alled. And once you install computer use, there is some system permissions that you need to do, pretty typical Mac OS stuff, accessibility, screen recording, things like that. You just need to give it permission to do all that stuff and then once you do you can use it. So the first demo I want to show you guys is something to do with managing uh your email. Uh specifically for me, I get a lot of receipts and a lot of like invoice paid emails and I need to ke ep track of those for tax stuff. Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and jump into the mail app. Now the mail app for those that know, they don't have a CLI or anything like that. There is no command line interface. There's nothing that would hook into like cloud co-work or anything like that. So what computer use is going to do is it's going to interact with mail. So the goal of this automation is I have this folder right here called Sane Receipts. And this is where all my receipts come in at. You can see I have three in here. I just ran this the other day against 68 receipts. So this thing can there there really is no limit to this other than like your token usage. All of these right here, what it's going to do is it's going to go through these and then it's going to come into my numbers document and I have an expense tracking document. And this is this is my actual expense tracking document, and it's just going to add these receipts to my expense tracker. So that's what we're going to do with this. Okay, so what we're gonna do is in codex here we're gonna use natural language to tell it what we want it to do. So uh I need you to go through some oops receipts. And then so whenever you want to use computer use, there's a couple of ways you can use it. You type the at symbol and you can just type computer and that will trigger the plugin for computer use . But what we're actually going to do this time is we're going to type uh in at mail. So you can see right here it show it sees the Mac app mail. So we're gonna go ahead and pull that up. So it's gonna tell it to go into the mail app. Go through my scene receipts folder and add these receipts to my and then we're gonna tell it my expen se tracking actually it's just called tracker expense tracker document in at and then again we're gonna say at numbers here And then so basically, our this is our automation right here. I need you to go through some receipts in Ad Mail. Go through my same receipts folder and add these receipts to my expense tracker document in numbers. Add the name, date, and amounts. Let's go ahead and run this. This video is sponsored by Heipolo. Hey Polo is a privacy first location sharing app First off, it's cross-platform, so if you're on iOS, you can see where your friends and family are that are on Android devices or vice versa. Second, it has a bunch of killer features. Flexible visibility so you can set it so you can share your exact location, a general area, or turn on a private mode. Notifications so you can know when your partner say left work so you can start working on dinner. A low battery status warning, so if somebody just suddenly drops off the map, you know not to panic that hey, their device probably just ran out of battery. There's also trip history and an emergency check-in system so you can quickly let your group know that you need help. Hey Polo is created by the same team behind my favorite VPN, Surfshark. So they know privacy and cybersecurity. And they're bringing the same standards from Surfshark to Hei Polo. And at no point can anyone on Heipolo track you without your consent. Now there's a few different reasons why you might want to use something like this. If you're a parent, you might want to keep track of your kids and just know where they are at all tim es. My girlfriend and I use location sharing all the time so we can know when the other person is going to be home. We also have an upcoming family trip to Disneyland and I'm going to be pitching Hey Polo to the group . I think this could be a really great app for just kind of knowing where everyone is in the park. In Hey Polo, you can create different groups for events, friends, families, anything that you could think of, any kinds of groups that you want. You can create as many groups as you want. And of course, like I mentioned, no one can be added without their consent. And at any point you can stop sharing your location with anyone. Be sure to check out Heipolo today. Go to hey polo. com forward slash lolly and use code Lolly to get forty percent off your first year. My thanks to Hey Polo for sponsoring this video. Now, the first time you interact with an app, it's going to ask for permission to work with it. You'll see that right down here. Now, I know I want Codex to interact with mail, so I'm gonna click always allow. But just know that means anytime you tell codex to interact with mail, it's going to just interact with it without any permissions. Now you could turn that off and it would just hit allow and it will ask for permission every time it inter acts with mail but I'm gonna select always allow and now it's gonna start looking through mail and it 's gonna start going through that receipt and what you can see here what makes it cool is there is an other cursor now. There is this cursor over here, and it is interacting with male options. It's doing stuff in the background. So I can come over here and I can open up reader and I can start browsing through reader while it's do ing this stuff. Hey, great X-Men 97 stuff. And it's still doing stuff in the background. I it is not taking over my computer in any way, which is really, really nice that's what makes this im pressive is I'm still interacting with my computer I'm still doing stuff I want to do while it's running this automation in the background so even though it's using the GUI and it's creating another mouse, an other pointer. I'm still interacting with my computer. I'm still in full control of my computer. This stuff is just happening in the background. Okay, so it looks like it found uh all three receipts and like I said it did like 68 the other day. So it's I'm not just throwing it a softball here. Uh but it that's just what I had in this folder. So it found all three receipts. Now it's asking for permission to use numbers. Again, I'm gonna just gonna click always allow here and then I am just gonna click allow and now it's gonna start going through here and it opened up my expense tracking document and it'll start adding st uff to this document here. So uh you can it sees that it's opened the 2026 sheet. It's going to worry about column A, C and D, like I told it to skip column B because I made an issue here um that i personally need to fix and that's something i will do later on but again i'm interacting with my computer on top it's doing all this stuff in the background now by no means is codecs and computer use fast? It would probably be quicker for me to do this stuff, but what's nice is this is happening in the back ground. This is repetitive stuff that I don't necessarily need to be the one to do. And because of that, I can do other tasks. I can edit a video. I can work on photo edits. I could answer email while it's going through my inbox and stuff like that. Like I don't need to be managing all of this stuff personally because and because these are repetitive tasks, I don't need to be doing these all the time. It can do this while I'm reading my RSS feed. That is really nice. And so we can click back over here and you can see that it's added those items it's added the dates and it'll go through and take care of everything else so it's going through and it's saying you know what the the uh items were that I bought what the total was when I purchased that stuff. Okay, so it finished up, it added those three items, it added the totals, it added the date, it gave us you can see all that right here in codex, and basically that means these receipts are done now i could have added one more command and i should have when i did that to taste basically take these emails in fact let's just do it take the emails from the folder and move them to twenty twenty-six receipts. And it's going to think on that for a second and it'll kick off it here. Now what I should have done is I should have added this to the initial prompt so it would have happen ed in all one go. I didn't, I just didn't do that. Um but as you can see, it moved those emails, they are in the 2026 receipts folder, and it'll finish up here in just a second. Pretty, pretty cool. Uh and again, all happened in the background. Say I wasn't using numbers here. I was using Google Sheets. I could use the plugin for Google Sheets, and this would actually all just be even faster because it would n't be using my computer, it wouldn't be having to manually click through things, it would be using the uh actual plugin for uh Google Sheets and all that stuff, so that would be faster if you use Google S heets. But I use numbers, I don't want to switch my application because a tool can't interact with it. That's the cool thing about computer use, is anything that is on your Mac, computer use can interact with it. Doesn't matter if there's a plugin or not. There is no numbers plugin. So Codex on its own wouldn't have been able to work with numbers. It was only because the computer use that it was able to interact with numbers. So anything on my Mac, anything in my doc, applications folder, desktop, documents, anything on the Mac , it can interact with because of computer use. And that's really cool. Okay, so for our second demo, I want to show you how computer use interacts with obsidian. Obsidian has been my note-taking and writing app for a really long time now. Uh, and obsidian doesn't have any plugins for uh codex or even Claude Cowork or anything like that. Now, the nice thing about Obsidian is it's all just file-based. So, really, you don't technically need any plugins for that, but I wanna show you how I have been using Obsidian uh with uh with with codex and computer use. So I'm gonna go over here to New Chat and now what's interesting about codex is you can have it work with in a project. So I have a project set up for obsidian already so it knows kind of where all my obsidian stuff lives and stuff like that you can set these projects up over here when you set a project up you can set it up from scratch name it uh we'll just call one test and you can kind of you know tell it where to interact give it files and photos and it kind of just understands you know it's it it's kind of like a contain er essentially for that project so we're gonna go uh back to new chat. Let's have it work in Obsidian. And I get a lot of PDF documents, like just a wild number of PDF documents, and a lot of them are um f illed with a lot of fluff, a lot of extra stuff that I just don't need. So what I have been using Codex and computer use for, and even before that, I was using Claude for this too, a bit, but now with computer use, I can just have it work right in obsidian. Is I will take those PDF documents, have the uh AI summarize them, make a document for them, and then save them right into obsidian. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm gonna pull up a document here. So we'll add files and photos. We'll do reviewers guide and let's pick a big one. Let's let's pick one that's that's pretty that's pretty hefty. Uh iOS 15 reviewers guide. Let's do that one right here. Okay. Okay. So the prompt is this is a reviewer's guide. I need you to summarize and pull out all the key points, then turn it into a markdown document with pro per headings. After that, save it into obsidian, and that's where I, you know did the at symbol and typed obsidian into my research folder. So I have a whole folder in here called research. So it's gonna save it into here. So let's go ahead and run this. So it's probably gonna take a minute because this is a big document. So it's going to go ahead and find all the key points, do the articles, research folders ready. Let's just let it run. And again, I can just do other stuff while this is running. I don't need to pay attention to this. It's cool. Yep, I can do them whatever I want. Now what I love about computer use is how accessible it is. This is all just running via my just natural language text prompt. And it even did some stuff with Python and stuff like that. You don't need to know Python, you don't need to know how to use the terminal, you don't need to know what applications have a CLI or a command line interface, you don't even you don't have to deal with c lawbot or any of that stuff. It's all just right there. And in fact, looks like it just finished or it's or it's almost finished right here. Yep. It finished. It did that summarization in three minutes and 15 seconds. Let's come over here to Obsidian. And there you go. That is our uh summary of the PDF document. This is now in my obsidian vault, so I can search for it inside obsidian. I don't have to open up a PDF document. This is in Obsidian. I can link to it. I can do all the stuff that you can do in Obsidian, which is a lot. I've covered all that already. But this is this is really, really handy. I I am very impressed by this because, like I said, it's incredibly accessible. I didn't need to know how to do terminal stuff or how to install Python or any of that stuff. Like I know how to do that, but I didn't need to mess with any of that stuff. Codex and computer use handled all that for me. Okay, so so far I've showed you how you can manually run automations, which is handy. Like that that is something I do quite a bit in shortcuts and stuff like that when I just have a one- off thing that I just want an automation to run in the background and take care of itself, but automations are at their best when they can be triggered automatically. Hence the name. So let's let me show you how you can do it based on time. So let's come over here to this automation tab and there's some preset stuff built into it but we're g onna ignore that and just go to new automation and in here you can tell it where you want it to work but the important part right here is you can tell it when to run so there's hourly daily we,ekdays, weekly or, a custom field plus time. So I'm gonna set this one to run um at 12, 10 a. m. So a little bit after midnight. And there's a few other options in here that you can play with, but we're we're just gonna focus on this stuff right now. Now, what would be really nice out of the demos that we did is I could have set up an automation to run that receipt to expense tracker automation. So that way it just goes through my email a little bit after midnight every single day and takes care of that. Make sure my expense tracking spreadsheet is always up to date. But let's let's do something different. Let's let's let's move on from that. But kind of sticking within email, I'm gonna go ahead and pull up uh this guy right here. I already wrote out the prompt. Um so this is going to uh let's fix it up a little bit. So let's have this go through mail and it's going to add that to parcel. Help if I could type. Okay. All right. So what we're going to do is we're going to have this automation look for any email in the mail app that has let's clean this up that has come in the last 24 hours actually let's switch this to the last week because I don't think I've had anything come in the last 24 hours. In the last week just just for the sake of the demo but you could just do 24 hours uh to come into the SANE later or SAIN receipts folder that has any tracking information add that tracking information to parcel include the name and tracking data, double check that it's the right carrier. I'm gonna add something else to this. Ignore anything from Amazon. Because parcel has automatic Amazon integration, so I don't need it to worry about Amazon packages. It would just be wasting tokens on that. So let's go ahead, I gotta title this and let's just call this tracking info. Um so let's go ahead and add this. Uh oh, select a project. Uh we'll just call it test project. That's fine. We'll throw it in there. Um now I'm not gonna wait until a little bit after midnight to show you how to run this. So I'm just gonna manually run it now and it's started. Let's go ahead and click into this. Now it's gonna start thinking, it's gonna start opening apps, and again, this all happens in the back ground. And this is a timed automation. So the only thing that needs to happen for this to run is my computer needs to be on and codex needs to be open. This really benefits from like a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio because you're probably not going to want to leave a laptop on all the time. Oh Oh, let's see if it gets confused on this because that is not the mail app. That is just a mail window. It might get confused on that. That might be interesting. Oh, nope. It figured it out. Nice. Okay. All right. So uh it's going to confirm it's gonna look through stuff. Let's see, it's gonna start clicking through mail on um stuff in these folders to kind of find something with tracking I know there's at least one thing that fits this criteria. So it I know it at least it should find exactly one thing, uh, but it could find more. Alright, so it found the tracking information for my dog's dog food. It added it to parcel and went ahead and uh named it the appropriate thing, the life's abundance, that 's the name of the dog food. Um I mean I would have just named it dog food, but that's fine. Like I know what that is. So it also went through and double checked and made sure that was the proper uh a carrier because somet imes parcel can get hung up on the wrong carrier so we did go through and it double check to make sure it was the right carrier before saving and there it is it's all there and it's already been delivered which I know I have it in the other room but uh that worked out perfectly so yeah there you go there' s there's one more timed automation so another automation I want to show you guys is something you could just do with you know your files like Finder so let's come over here to Finder and uh I have a video pro jects folder and whenever I finish something I always add thumbnails to this underscore finish thumbna ils folder and videos to this underscore videos folder but I always forget to back them up to my NAS or move them to my NAS specifically. They get backed up via time machine. But I want to I have a specific folder in my NAS. We'll come over here. Archive. Ooh, showing hidden folders, hidden files. Uh let's see here. Projects and then video archive. So every single one of my videos has been saved here, or almost every single one. I lost if lost some of my earlier stuff, but let's go ahead and set up an automation so that every da y, if there's anything in this folder, it automatically gets backed up here. Now, this is something you could do with Hazel, um, but Hazel, you know, requires you to do some click ing and some logic and stuff like that. The benefit of computer use in codecs means we can just do it all in natural language. So let's come up here to new automation. Uh, we'll just leave all this alone. We'll set project to test. It's fine. We'll just call this finished video archive. And um basically what we're gonna do is we're just going to at computer use right at the beginning so we're going to tell it we need to use computer use. Okay so what I did with this prompt is I started off by saying at computer and then I just told it I want you to move any files that are in my finished videos folder to my video archive folder. The video archive folder is on NAS-FS01. I probably don't need that last sentence, but it didn't take me any extra time to really add that. So I just put it in there just to kind of give it a leg up. Let's go ahead and create this right here. Now there's four items in here. So if we go ahead and run this right now, let's go ahead and click into it. It's gonna be thinking for a minute. It's gonna find these folders and then it's going to start moving that around. Now, like I said, I told it was computer use. It's gonna do this stuff. Oh, it's asking if I wanna use finder. Again, I'm just going to click always allow. And it's going to look for Finder. My one complaint about codex and computer use is their uh prompts for like asking permissions kind of blend into the app a little too much. So you almost miss them. Um, that is kind of an annoying complaint. Now you can see here it's searching for the folder, it's doing its own thing over here. Um, let's just, you know, open up reader while it's doing that. Oh hey, cool. There's stuff happening. Um Wow. Okay. Oh, codex would like to use the network volume. Allow. And once you get through the system permissions the first time, it shouldn't be asking you this stuff again. I have purposely made sure I didn't do always allow so I could show you the system permissions and st uff in in this demo. But now that I've been doing this, I'm just gonna click always allow. Uh, because this stuff I know what I'm doing, I know what it's going to be running, and I'm okay with it to just always run. So it's moving stuff. I verified the target. Two files with the same name already exists, so I'm gonna do non-overwriting move, leaving the existing archive. Okay, so I've actually already copied some stuff over there. Uh that's my fault. But I'm glad it's not overwriting anything. That's good. That that's really good. And again, this is all stuff. It's using terminal commands right here, but I don't need to know the terminal commands because it's do ing it for me. It's really cool. And you can kind of see behind this window, uh, that stuff has actually started to move. There were four items in there. Now there's only two. So this is a little interesting. It saw that there are two items named the same, but they differ in size. So it's running a comparison. Uh, I probably have another video named that in there that like an older video that I did that's probab ly just like the template name, not the YouTube name, but like the template name that I just exported as is the same. Uh so it's going to appear differ and it okay. One duplicate is safe to clear. Nice. Okay. Does not match the existing archive, so I'm preserving both by moving the source copy. Sweet. So it's gonna move both, it's gonna keep both, that's perfect. Fantastic. Okay, so right here, uh we finished up. Let's go ahead and close this. You'll see all the finished videos are gone and they are in the video archive folder on the NAS now. So this is something that like I just forget to do it all the time. But now my computer's just gonna do it for me in the background. I don't need to worry about it. That's really handy. So so far I have showed you how to run automations on your Mac for your Mac completely when you're sitt ing at your Mac. But what if you're not sitting at your Mac? What if your Mac's at home and you just have your iPhone? Well, as long as your Mac is on and Codex is open, you can actually run computer use automations on your iPhone and everything is happening on your Mac. So let me show you how that works. So we're gonna open up the Chat GPT app because there is no Codex app and you need to come into the C odex option in here. Now you'll have to basically there's some setup that you sync codecs on your phone to uh the codex app on your Mac. There's just like a QRO card QR code that you scan, it's really super simple. But once you're set up, you'll see at the top, you'll see your computer name dot local, and there'll be a green dot if it's connected. Mine's Donatello because all my devices are named after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So we're going to come in here to chat now. So we have this new thread here and I am going to come into this plus button right here and I'm going to select computer use. So that tells it it's gonna, you know, it's it's gonna work on our computer. It's the whole thing that we've been doing this video. I'm just gonna hit the dictation button. There is an audio file in my downloads folder. I need you to take that and run it through the application hush. Set the output destination to my underscore temp folder it is in the documents folder on my Mac do not change any presets in hush just run that file. So there it goes. We sent the uh command to you can kind of see here if it focuses. It sent the command, now it's responding and it's okay. So you see all the commands are now happening on my iPhone here. I could just lock my iPhone and let it do its thing, but I'll kind of show you as it goes through. So it says it's using computer use, it's found several audio files in the downloads folder, several in a timeline folder. That's fine. The destination, it sets the destination uh to be uh uh the underscore temp file. It's gonna open hush and leave its current presets. So it's doing its thing, it's asking for permission to use Hush, so I'm gonna approve it, and then on ce it does that, it opens it on the Mac and it'll start doing its thing. So I'm gonna move this over and click here so you can kind of see that it's doing its thing. It's all running on the iPhone. Hands up, I'm not doing anything. It's thinking. There you go, it found the right temp folder. It's opening that, all still running on the iPhone. Looking for the audio file now. There it goes. It found the audio file in my downloads folder. It's processing that audio file. So this is something I do all the time. I process audio files all the time. But I don't really need to be sitting at my computer to do this. There's nothing in this app that I need to manage. So what I could do is I could set up a command to watch my downloads folder, see when there is a timel ine. zip file, unzip that file, look for the audio files, process those, save them to the folder, and then that way when I come and sit down at my Mac, my audio files for my podcast are ready to go and I could just start editing. This isn't something I need to wait on because while Hush is a really fast application, these are really large audio files. They're you know typically hour to hour 15, hour 20 minutes. So they can take a couple of minutes to process. This is not something I need to sit here and babysit. This is a perfect example of how I can use codecs and computer use on my phone to trigger something on my computer and then by the time I get here and sit down at my computer it's ready to go. Alright so hush is finishing up here. I know this is going to go smooth because uh codex is basically done now. It's just going to save it to that temp folder. But this right here is really making me want uh either a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio to just leave always on so I can just have it do stuff for me. And when I get to my computer, those files and those processes and those projects are ready to go. And I can start doing my creative work. It's just, it's so cool here. We can go over in a finder now and I'll show you. It's there. Uh it's this this one right here because it adds the suffix underscore fixed. Um it's so that's it's so cool. Uh all without me needing to do any programming, without me needing to know terminal, CLIs, any install any weird third-party apps or plugins or utilities or anything like that. It took care of everything for me. I didn't need to do anything. I literally sent a couple of sentences, typed a couple of sentences on my phone and it was did a process that normally takes me a couple of minutes to kind of drag and drop and move things around and stuff like that. And it was just there ready to go. Very impressive. I'm really wanting an always on Mac now, especially either Mac Mini or Mac Studio. But I'm kind of waiting for the M5 updates. But uh I think I either have a Mac Mini or a Mac Studio in my near future. Okay, so those are quite a few demos of how I have been using computer use. Computer use is free to use with ChatGPT and Codex, but with the free tier, if you use it pretty heav ily, like the stuff I did in this demo, if you were to do this on the free tier, you would run out of tokens really quick. Uh so I am paying for the twenty dollar a month plan and I haven't ran into any usage issues just yet with computer use. Maybe once I if I keep using it more and more, maybe I might then. But uh the $20 a month plan seems to cover everything for me. But that's computer use. I want to hear from you all. What do you think of computer use? What are you going to use it for? Let me know in the comments below. If you like the video, hit the thumbs up button, subscribe if you haven't already, and have a great da y.