Codex for Everything and Everyone

Cutting-edge AI tools used to be the domain of engineers. No longer. Now the technology is accessible enough that anyone who wants to work more efficiently and ambitiously can use coding agents like Codex. With that in mind, staff writer Katie Parrott updates our guide to using Codex for knowledge work, head of social media Becky Isjwara shares her Codex hack for making YouTube thumbnails, and Anthropic’s new Slack agent, Claude Tag, validates the collaborative, shared-agent future Every has been living in since January.

We’re hosting a live Codex for Power Users Camp this Friday, June 26, for paid Every subscribers. During the two-hour event, the Every team will share how Codex has become a daily driver for writing, research, growth, customer support, and engineering. RSVP.

Our ‘Codex for Knowledge Work’ guide gets an upgrade

Codex has been on a tear lately. With new features like Sites and role-specific plugins, and high-concept video ads scattered across San Francisco, OpenAI really wants you to know that Codex is not just for coders anymore.

According to the company, they’re chasing promising early signals. Codex has only 5 million weekly active users overall; for comparison, ChatGPT has 900 million. But knowledge workers account for about 20 percent of Codex users—and are growing more than three times as fast as developers. OpenAI is betting that this fast-growing group is early evidence that Codex can become the place everyone gets agentic work done, whether they identify as “technical” or not.

The product is evolving quickly around that bet. OpenAI has launched role-specific plugins that allow Codex to assume the expertise of a financial analyst or a product manager, and Sites to present any kind of outputs and information, technical or not. It’s a lot to keep up with—and I say that as someone whose job is to keep up with it.

That’s a big part of why I think OpenAI still has an onboarding problem to solve. The people I talk to who are interested in AI but considerably less AI-pilled than I am are open to Codex. They’re simply unsure what they would use it for, let alone how to use it well. Codex’s flexibility is great for getting a variety of work done, but it gives new users very little guidance about where to begin.

Our “Codex for Knowledge Work” guide offers one opinionated perspective on how to get the most out of Codex.

We published the guide less than a month ago, but because so much keeps changing with Codex, we expedited an update, including:

A new map of how projects, threads, Goals, plugins, and Sites fit together
A deeper explanation of how Codex reaches your work through local files, connected apps, skills, MCP servers, browser use, and computer control
Stronger guidance on mobile control, team handoffs, permissions, human review, and workflow ownership
A 30-day plan for moving from one reliable personal workflow to more advanced uses such as plugins, Sites, and automation

This guide is a jump start for Codex, not the definitive way to use the tool. The more you work with Codex, the more you learn to ask it what it needs from you—and the more you discover it can do. One insider tip: Give the whole guide to Codex, tell it about your role and tools, and ask it to help you choose your first workflow.—Katie Parrott

Read the guide

Steal (one more) Codex workflow

Codex, make me a thumbnail

AI progress is fast, but the speed can register as background noise as you go about your day-to-day.

And then—bam!—a new model drops, and parts of your job that were annoyingly time-consuming are suddenly easier. That’s what head of social media Becky Isjwara experienced when OpenAI released its latest image generation model in late April. The model’s editing capabilities were so good that she was able to streamline her process for creating thumbnail images for YouTube videos, which previously required having on-camera talent sit for photoshoots. Here’s Becky’s new workflow:

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