You aren't using Codex like me...

There are so many unknown tips and tricks to get the most out of Codex and even advanced users often times don't know all of them. That's what this video is about. I put together everything I have learned about Codex after using it for over a thousand hours and it doesn't matter if you're a beginner or you're very experienced, you will get something out of this video. And I talk a lot about how to get the most out of artificial intelligence on this channel and if you appreciate that, please drop a like, hit the subscribe button. It does help the channel. Thank you in advance. Now that GPT-5.6 is out, you have so many different options to choose from even just within the 5.6 family. Whether you're choosing Soul, Terra or Luna or the five levels of thinking effort or fast versus regular. And so knowing when to use which model, which thinking effort is an entire skill in itself. Now, I don't want to get too technical here, but I did want to show this graph really quick just to show you the differences between Soul, Terra and Luna, which are the three sizes of the GPT-5.6 model family. Luna is the smallest, Terra is in the middle and Soul is the largest and they should be relatively as capable as their size but it turns out it's not actually that way. So on the Y axis, what you're seeing is the total score. So higher equals better. On the X axis, what you're seeing is the budget. So to the left is actually cheaper, to the right is more expensive. And so where you want to be is as high up as possible and to the left as possible. So you really want to be in this quadrant. And so what you're seeing is Soul definitely scores the highest. Terra has a lower score pretty much than all of the relevant Luna models, the smaller ones. So if you're on Luna Max, you are paying less and getting more performance out of the model than if you were going to use Terra high. All of this, I know, sounds a little bit confusing. Just think about this. For your hardest problems, go with Soul. For everything else, go with Luna. So, generally what I'm using is Soul, and for the effort, I'm usually sitting at the high effort level. Sometimes I'll go down to medium. I basically never use Soul light. Then, for everything else, for the easier tasks, I'm going with 5.6 Luna, and I'm doing high or extra high on Luna. Now, whether or not you use fast is up to you. If you have time to spare, I recommend not using fast because it is two and a half times as expensive, and you only get one and a half X the speed up. And by the way, there are a number of ways to mix and match the models, so you're using the right model for the right task. So, for example, in the agents.md file, I can write a rule that says, "Anytime I do some kind of work, I automatically want it to spin up a new thread in Codex using a certain model size and thinking effort, and kick it off there." And that's actually really cool. I'm going to come back to that in a second, but basically what it is is whenever the operator says deploy, and that just means take the code that I've written and put it on my website or my app, immediately create a separate project-scoped thread in the exact same project folder as the original thread. And here's the key, using model GPT 5.6 Luna with max thinking. And here's something that I don't think most people know. In Codex, each of these on the left side are called threads. Each of those threads can see all of the other threads. And so, that allows you to do a few really interesting things, one of which is kicking off a thread from an existing thread. That allows you to delegate work to other models, other thinking budgets, while your main thread is managing it. So, here's just an example of what that might look like. Create a new thread using GPT 5.6 Luna Max and give it the prompt to reply with hello. Now, what you're seeing here is we're using GPT 5.6 Soul Light Fast. Let's just hit enter and let's see what happens. So, I'll create the task with that model and send that exact prompt. There we go. So, here's the task. You can just click it right there and reply with hello sent by Codex from another task and hello. So, it's a very cool feature that allows you more fine-grained control over what's going on in Codex. Another thing this allows you to do is manage a bunch of threads from a main thread. So, let's say you have a bunch of threads running in parallel and you just want to baby sit them. You want to make sure that they're running and that they're progressing appropriately, then you can spin up one thread to watch all the other ones. If one of them stops, that master thread will see it and then prompt it again and push it along. So, another thing now that GPT 5.6 is here is to take another look at your agents.md file. That file probably has accumulated a lot of rules from previous Codex models. And what happens is a rule that applied back then may not apply anymore. So, every time a new model release comes out, this is something that we like to do. Review my agents.md file for any stale rules or things we should revise or remove. All right, so it actually found a bunch of really stale things in my agents.md file. So, all I'm going to say is clean it up. And so, just take a look at your agents.md file because remember, those get loaded very frequently into the context window of every agent that you're using. And another thing you should be using are plugins. Plugins are awesome and they allow you to give a ton of additional functionality to Codex including from the sponsor of today's video, Zapier. Let me show you how to set that up. You're going to go into settings, you're going to come down here on the left side under integrations and click plugins, then click on the MCPs, and you can see I already have this Zapier plugin right there. And what's really neat about the Zapier MCP is you basically get access to Zapier's over 9,000 different applications. So, whether you're using Gmail, Trello, Asana, Google Docs, almost everything, you literally can just plug it right into Codex. And I've actually been using Zapier for well over 10 years at previous companies of mine, and I am a huge fan of what they're doing. They have been building automations for a very long time, so they know exactly what they're doing. So, if you want safety, security, and confidence in knowing that it's going to work the first time, go check out Zapier MCPs. I'm going to drop a link down below so you can find it easily, and thank you again to Zapier for sponsoring this video. All right, the next thing that you have to use is the browser in Codex. It is incredible. Browser use has gotten so good lately, especially with GPT 5.6 that I foresee the Codex browser and the Claude code browser, which they just released, becoming my daily driver browsers by the end of this year, if not sooner. That's how frequently I'm using it, and you can now import all of your cookies and all of your passwords directly into the Codex browser, and it is dead simple. As soon as you open up the browser, it's going to say, "Do you want to import your cookies and passwords?" You just say yes, and it does it. You should be using the Codex browser for everything, not just testing your website or the app that you're building, which is awesome, but you can literally do anything, any real-world work you can do. So, here's an example. I have this folder and this I know is overly simplistic, but you could do a lot with this and I basically wanted to take these two documents, this Cisco talk and this Hermes agent one and put it in a new archive folder. So, I'm just going to hit enter. I gave it a short prompt and you're actually going to watch it work right now. So, I've done some really complex tasks with this including changing DNS records. I've also auto scaled up and down my Superbase instance and here you go. You can actually see it working right now. It's not only very accurate, it's actually pretty darn fast now, too. It's creating a new folder, going to name it archive, create. There's that new folder. Now, hopefully it puts those two files in there. All right, so there we go. It finished. So, you can really do some awesome complex things with the browser in Codex. All right, the next thing I want to talk about and you probably have heard of it. You probably also use it, but it's still so underrated and that is skills. You should be adding a ton of very useful skills to your Codex, to Claude code if you use that, to cursor if you use that. Skills I really think are still very underrated and this is one of my favorite skills if you're doing any coding. This is Matt Pocock's skills skill and it has a bunch of very useful skills if you're doing any type of coding. So, to add it, you copy the URL, you come into Codex, you say install this skill and then just paste it in there and it'll know what to do. It'll do the rest for you. All right, I know I've talked about this a lot, but the next thing I want to talk about are loops. In Codex, they are called goals. It basically tells Codex to keep working towards some overarching goal and you find that it works for a very long time, hours, sometimes even days. And loops are really powerful when you have a specific goal in mind and that goal can be a number of different things. And if loops sound very foreign, I put together a loops library so you can explore other people's loops that they've been using very successfully. So, this is the loop library. You can find loops from myself, from Jason at OpenAI, from Peter Steinberger from OpenAI. And all of these loops are tried and true and work very well. I also created the Loopy skill, which you can install into Codex and it'll help you create loops based on your codebase. It'll help you draft loops based on what you're trying to accomplish. It'll also help you find existing loops. All of this is very simple. I'll drop all of these links down below. And loops are especially powerful because you can set a goal for them, and the agent will just keep working until it reaches that goal. No more giving a single prompt, waiting 30 minutes, and then it gives you a single answer back. You literally say, "Here's the overall goal. I'm not even going to tell you how to solve it. Just go solve it and keep working until you do." So, here's an example loop that I run all the time. I do {slash} goal, run our benchmark. When you're done, examine the ways that Astro failed and attempt to fix them. Continue iterating on this until our benchmark score reaches 90% or above. And so, I basically wrote my own custom private benchmark for this project that I'm building. And I'm telling Codex, "Run that benchmark, and if the score is under 90%, look for why it's under 90%, fix it, and then run the benchmark again." And sometimes this runs for, you know, up to 12 hours straight, just consistently improving over time. And what I found is, let's say I'm starting at 70% pass rate on the benchmark, it eventually gets all the way up to 90%, and I don't have to do anything else. I just kick off the goal, and it goes. All right, for those of you who are absolutely addicted to Coda, this one's for you. I'm surprised by how few people know about this, but here's the thing, you can control your Coda X on your computer from your mobile device anywhere in the world. And here's how you do it. So, you're going to go into settings, you're going to go here on the left side and click connections, and right here it says control this Mac. You're going to click this little add button here. Then on your mobile phone, you're going to scan this QR code from Coda X and it's going to set up a connection between your mobile phone and your desktop. All of this still runs technically locally, so you have Coda X running on your computer, you have Coda X mobile running on your phone, and you have one controlling the other. Once you have that connection set up, you're going to come over here where it says remote, you're going to click that, and this is actually a live view directly into my desktop's Coda X. So, you can see right here. Here's the Astro Hub folder. Here's the Matthews Mac Studio 6 local, and that little green dot means it's actively connected. And so, I can kick it off from here and it will control my desktop. Now, this is useful if you want to just continue the things that you're working on. You can also control your computer from anywhere in the world from your phone by doing this because Coda X can control your computer and now you can control Coda X. So, super useful. Highly recommend you set this up, especially if you're like me and you want to code on the go. All right, this next one is quite serious. Matt Schumer, friend of the show, tweeted this out a few days ago. GPT 5.6 Soul just accidentally deleted almost all of my Mac's files, and this is why I trust Fable a thousand times more. Now, even though he trusts Fable, I love GPT 5.6. So, I want to make sure that this never happens to me. There are a few ways to do that, and this is what we're going to be talking about in this section, overall security and safety. And so, Am will posted about it, and this is really the best way to do it. Block this with a hook, I would suggest that you do that. Okay, so let me show you what that actually means. When AI writes code, let's say it says, "Okay, I'm going to write code to remove every single file on your desktop." I don't want that to happen, but I can't definitively prevent AI from writing that code. Sometimes it'll hallucinate. This probably won't happen to you, but there is really no way to prevent it definitely. And so, when Codex actually goes to run the code, that's when we can actually prevent it from running. Here's what you want to do. And by the way, I'm going to drop this prompt in a GitHub gist down below, so you can just copy paste it. So, set up these as real Codex lifestyle hooks by following the official documentation. So, what we're going to do is prevent deletion of the root file system, deletion of contents of the root file system, delete the entire home directory, deleting all user directories, and so on. And so, after all of this, hopefully, we will prevent any other catastrophic issues. But, you can even get more fine-tuned than that. You can have any rules that you want. This is just what I have. Now, if you go into settings, click hooks over here, so pre-tool use. And what the tool use is is Codex will call a tool to execute a command on your computer, and we want it to happen. We want that filter to happen before that happens. So, right here we can see hook one, and it's all configured. And the last thing on safety, I usually leave approvals as full access, unrestricted access to the internet, any file on your computer. And I actually would not recommend doing that for most people. Most of all, you want to do this approve for me. It's basically a model that determines which commands should just be run without your your and then whenever it gets to a command that it thinks is severe or has the chance to do some kind of catastrophic change on your computer, it's going to ask you for approval. So, I highly recommend most people just do approve for me. So, that's it. Those are all the suggestions I have for you for today. Hopefully, this levels up your Codex game, and I actually created a whole 'nother video specifically about vibe coding. And so, if you want to see that, check it out right here.