# AI Operating Systems & Agent-Native SaaS Strategy

**Podcast:** The Startup Ideas Podcast
**Published:** 2026-07-09

## Transcript

GPT 5.6 is here and it's a big deal.
My friend Dan Chipper has been testing it for weeks and in this episode he shows you how you can use codecs with GPT 5.6 to run your personal life and run your business.
His setup is really, really cool.
And by the end of this episode, you're going to learn where 5.6 works, where it doesn't work.
You're also going to learn how to use codecs in a really, really, really cool, interesting way so that you can make money, be more productive and just automate a lot of that boring stuff.
I loved having Dan on this episode.
He's a fountain of knowledge and he shows everything.
So enjoy the episode and I'll see you at the end.
Really excited about this podcast, Dan Shipper.
I begged him to come on, he came on.
Dan, by the end of the episode, what are we going to learn?
We're going to learn how to use Codex to run your entire life and how to use it to build a compelling software business.
You have my attention.
Should we get started?
Let's do it.
Okay, so if you haven't used Codex, It is the OpenAI answer to Cloud Code, Cloud Desktop, Cloud, you know, Cloud Cowork.
If you've used it before, you may have used Codex CLI, which I do not recommend.
It is like, Codex CLI is trash.
The Codex Desktop app is what the Cloud Desktop app would have been if...
They had just thrown it out and they were like, what is the ideal way to build this?
Because right now, the Cloud Desktop app, it's like you've got chat, you've got code, you've got coworking.
And I'm always like, which one do I use?
And Codex, well, now they have two tabs, but really it's a much simpler implementation, much cleaner and much more powerful because it was built after OpenAI got to see, okay, like, This new paradigm of using an agent on your computer to do your knowledge work, it had already started to happen because of Cloud Code and Cloud Cowork.
And I feel like OpenAI just fast forwarded through all the messy stuff and they were like, this is the ideal implementation.
And I feel like Anthropic has a little bit of the mandate of heaven right now.
And OpenAI is quite underrated.
And I think Codex is the reason why.
most usable, most powerful, fastest model for specifically for knowledge work and for coding, but like specifically for knowledge work.
It's, it's not Fable level, but Fable is like, it's like a tactical nuke, you know, it's like, it's, it's so powerful.
It's like actually illegal.
Um, and five, six is, it's more like, I don't want to use a weapons analogy, so I'm going to move away from the weapons analogy because it's not a weapon.
It's more like having a Porsche.
It's great to drive around town.
You can do anything in it.
It goes fast.
It handles really well.
It's really good for collaborating.
I think of Fable as being something that you have to have skill, like a lot of skill to use it well.
5.6, it just works for everything you want it to do.
So anyway, that's all a big way of saying.
Five, six and codex is where I spend all my time.
It is my operating system for work.
I do everything from my emails to writing to I'm actually starting to train models now, which I think is a new frontier.
I don't even know what that means.
I want to get into that later.
Let's get into it.
Let's get into it.
I would say like just a just a real like a small preview is training your own model is the next step after making your own skill.
If you've made a skill for something and it's not quite working, fine-tuning a model is the next step.
And until recently, it was completely out of reach and not at all practical.
But 5.6 and Fable to some extent, if you can get around the guardrails, makes it easy enough to make a machine learning pipeline and run it.
And that's everything from like...
grabbing the data to making more synthetic data to actually running experiments.
It makes it easy enough to do that I think it's now possible for non-machine learning engineers to start doing it.
I'm intrigued.
I'd love to see what you got.
You want to start sharing your screen?
Let's go.
This is how I do my email.
So this is a little app that I built.
By the time this comes out, you'll probably be able to get this app.
It's called Tend, but you'll probably be able to get it as an open source library I'll release.
But honestly, you can literally just feed this video into Codex and just be like, make something like this and it will do that.
So, you know, do whatever you want.
But basically what this does is it goes through my inbox every day and it just finds every single unread email.
And then for each email, it makes a card.
And the card summarizes what was in the email.
And then it has a little draft reply that it that it drafts for me.
And then what I can do is I can say, can you I didn't deal with this yet.
Can you find some more times like later this week and show them to me in a draft?
And then it'll go do that.
And now we're on to the next email.
And.
I just go through my emails like this.
Let's see.
We want to keep writing.new.
It's on Namecheap currently.
I can get you the Cloudflare credentials.
And now we're on to the next one.
I'm going to just...
This reminds me of how I picture in the 1960s really wealthy business executives.
Like Mad Men style would answer their letters.
Dude, it's like literally the same thing.
It's just now everyone can do it.
And what's cool about this app is it works for your inbox, but it works for, and I will say, this is an open source experiment that I've built.
We have an email app called Quora, which is like a full inbox experience that is designed to be used in this way.
Um, so if you want to make your own as a builder, you can do this.
This is also sort of coming as a, as a full app.
But what's really cool about this is I have, uh, different feeds for different things that I, uh, that I, uh, do every day.
So, um, and in, in, in my, uh, in my codex, basically my codex is built so that I have a bunch of pinned threads for.
each part of my life that I care about.
So this is like my company thread.
And this is in this thread, this is all of the stuff that's going on in my company.
So basically what it'll do is instead of sweeping through my inbox, it will find all the slacks that I haven't seen and all the meeting notes that I haven't seen and turn it into cards.
And it gives me an idea of like the issues that are happening in the company.
And I can be like, I can decide.
is this an issue that I care about or not?
And if I do care about it, which I don't, if I do care about it, I can say like, oh, I'm going to go ping Brandon or ping someone else and be like, hey, what's going on with this thing?
In this case, I would just say archive.
But what's interesting is over time, it starts to learn what I care about, what it should bring to me.
And then also what the next best action is usually, like what I would normally do.
After I go through a feed, whether it's my company feed or my inbox, it then compounds the learnings of stuff that I liked or didn't like archived or didn't archive replies that I did.
And then it turns it into revised prompts.
And you can see all the prompts here.
So it has a feed policy for here's what Dan cares about.
Here's what he's here's what's on his mind.
Here's how to get specific.
specific sources, all that kind of stuff.
And yeah, it just like sort of changes my how I do work every day because everything can be turned into a feed with cards and a next best action.
And that's pretty sick.
And with 5.6 specifically, you're just seeing just better results?
Yeah, I think that 5.5 was fine, but not quite good enough.
I would say generally the email responses here.
So like this email draft, for example, is like it's it's as if I wrote it like it's maybe there's something that I would slightly change and I might.
But for 90 percent of the emails, which are like, you know, scheduling stuff and just more generic, it's it's really good.
So it's I think it's a very good writer and it is it makes far fewer mistakes.
Like it doesn't.
It doesn't like send emails that I probably wouldn't want it to send.
Like it's a little bit more careful.
And it's very resourceful.
Like it just it easily connects to Slack and it easily uses and browses the web.
Like I got a new apartment and I like literally have it like, you know, searching Facebook marketplace and like, you know, rendering like what the guest room is going to look like and shit.
And that's that's fucking crazy, man.
I think that people are sleeping on how flexible and powerful of a tool this is.
Because, okay, so it's got the image model in it.
And then it also has the ability to change other threads.
So I can have this thread message another codex thread.
And suddenly you're orchestrating all these different agents doing different things.
Anyway.
Well, that's sort of the aha moment I had at least with Codex was once I was starting to reference other threads and remembering things.
And I was like, okay, this is, that to me was like, okay, I understand what, you know, you said Codex is an operating system.
I had seen that for such a long time, but it was only until I started really referencing things that I was like, okay, I can see why this is this plus the browser.
It feels like an operating system.
That's the thing.
The reason I can do all my work in here is that it has this in-app browser.
This is proof.
This is a markdown editor that I made.
For example, this is my day today.
I'll just be in proof and I'll plan out my day and I'll click things and then I can say, okay, add an agenda for my startup ideas pod interview.
Codex will do it.
And while it's doing it, I'll be like down here writing like, you know, a few ideas on my mind, you know, Codex as an operating system, blah, blah.
And it's just going to like go, it'll go do a bunch of research.
It knows what we're building.
It knows what ideas I may have.
And that's one of the really cool things about it is it's so.
It has all the context on who you are and what you care about that it can bring to any app that you're using.
Now I can see now it's already in here.
It's, you know, looking at stuff.
And I it just it makes a big difference because, yeah, the the model being powerful is really important, but the model is only as powerful as the context you can give it.
And this thing is just like connected to your whole computer and the whole Internet.
And so I'm just like constantly in here like any kind of SaaS app.
I think the SaaS apocalypse is so dumb.
You know, here we've already got like a nice little agenda.
I think the SaaS apocalypse is so dumb because, um, a, yeah, I'm like vibe coding this inbox app, but 99% of the world is going to want to use something that's maintained by, by someone else.
Like, yes, you can one shot everything.
But the, um, I think the, the hard rare thing is moving to, can you build and maintain something over time?
And, uh, and that's still expensive and hard.
And in general, I think of software as being, if you can bring your agent to software, it's really powerful.
It's like giving it a structure to work inside of.
For us, we have a pretty big consulting business now.
And of course, the first thing we tried to do is vibe code around CRM and have it be a combination of agent and Google Sheets and stuff like that.
You can kind of do it, but it becomes a mess really quickly.
And we've just moved to a CRM vendor that has a CLI.
And it's like, they've thought through all the little corner cases and they're going to continue doing that.
And we get to actually do the work that we want to do instead of like vibe coding, you know, customer records and like thinking about all that kind of stuff.
So yeah, I'm very bullish on SaaS, like especially SaaS that's designed to be built inside of, designed to be used inside of the Codex in-app browser.
Right.
Yeah, I think, yes, you can build anything, but people will pay for maintenance.
That's sort of like the insight.
Totally.
If this thing works, I'm fine to pay for it.
And then I think that, again, another aha moment I had with Codex was just looking at this, seeing my SaaS.
We don't really think about it as a SaaS on the right-hand side, but it is a SaaS.
and how it interacts with my threads back and forth, back and forth, and how you can ping pong.
It just feels like, I don't know about you, but you can literally, it feels like you can spend 99% of your time in codex or in what other super app that you're going to use at this point.
I definitely agree.
I'm kind of back and forth on whether the super app thing is going to work, but I absolutely...
More of an operating system.
We say super app.
But it's really an operating system.
This episode, you're showing me ways how you operate your business and your life with Codex and 5.6.
Super app, I don't know.
It's just a cooler way of saying operating system.
Should we just make something?
Let's do it.
Okay.
So, okay.
Cause, cause one of the, and I've been playing around with this already, so there's probably some of it on my computer already, but I think, I think this would be kind of fun.
So what we're talking about, I think you framed it exactly right, which is, um, maintenance is the thing that people pay for because you can one shot anything now.
And so I want to make a little SAS that is designed to help people display that their, app is being maintained.
And there's already stuff like that on GitHub, for example, where you can kind of see how many commits have happened over the last period of time.
But I think we need that for any SaaS app that you encounter on the internet to be like, someone is maintaining this.
And not only that, but whenever a bug is reported or a feature is requested, here's how much time it took to fix it or to add the feature.
Because that's the sign that there's someone who's actually working on it.
And it's not just like a vibe-coded one-shot.
Do you think that would be fun to build?
100%.
Let's see if we can do it.
All right, let's see if we can do it.
All right, let's see.
All right, I want to build a little SaaS app called Turnaround.
There may be some demos and stuff on this computer already, but I want you to just ignore them because I want to do it from scratch and see what else comes out of this.
But the basic idea of turnaround is the value of SaaS is not in building the first version.
It's in doing the maintenance.
And we need a way to help people who are running SaaS apps display the maintenance that they're doing, which is basically the turnaround time from when someone requests.
a bug fix and the bug is being fixed or just overall the number of commits.
Like you want to see that commits are happening all the time on this app.
And I want a little like beautiful badge that gets displayed that you can put on your about page or something like that that validates that this app is being actively maintained and worked on.
Sort of like what GitHub does, but it should look good.
It should look cool.
It should look like sort of AI and futuristic.
And we should have a way where anyone can sign up for it.
You can put the badge on your website, but our job is to be the people that are sort of validating on the back end, like how many issues in GitHub you're taking down, stuff like that.
And it should work with any sort of data source.
So if you use linear, use Notion, whatever.
Can you use CEIDA and CE Brainstorm to help me figure out how this should work?
And the sound effect is from Monologue, which is our speech-to-text app that we've made.
operating on my other monitor so you can't see it but you can see the output and hear the sound.
What should we talk about while that's running?
From your experience building with 5.6, you said it wasn't exactly fable-like.
Pretty close.
When you say close, are we saying 80%, 90%?
A fable's at 100%.
Just trying to get a sense of where we were.
I think Fable is like an S tier, S plus tier model.
Like it's so good that it's illegal.
And this is like an A tier model, you know?
So you're not going to hack the NSA with 5.6, but, or like you're not going to, like, I mean, I'm not.
You might not successfully hack the NSA.
Like with Fable.
I was, um, we were like literally the, our bug backlog was emptied out.
You could just set it off and it was emptied out as long as you're willing to spend the money.
And with five, six, it's not really like that.
Like you have to do some thinking to fix bugs, for example.
Yeah.
But it's close.
So it's like 60, 70% ish.
But fable is this other thing.
It's because it's so, it's also so slow and it's so, um, expensive that it's really only meant for essentially like people who are doing machine learning or are orchestrating like fleets of agents, which is just a skill that most people don't have yet.
Cool.
All right.
First product fork.
What should the badge promise for prospective customers alive, responsive or dependable?
Hmm.
I will say dependable.
Like I like that there's a recommended option.
It's pretty good, right?
Yeah, it's pretty good.
That was sort of a miss in prior models.
It wouldn't have a taste.
I don't want to say the word taste because I shouldn't use that word.
But it didn't have a point of view.
An opinion, yeah.
And I just like these as, and part of this is I'm using this, our compound engineering plugin.
So part of this is the compound engineering plugin, but I just think that these are good options.
Like 5.6 just has good, I'm going to say it again, taste.
And I like the different vectors that it's, is it alive, responsive, or dependable?
I like alive.
For it to be credible, what happens when activity stops?
Yeah, state changes automatically.
Actually.
Yeah, state changes automatically.
Let's say that.
But it's not judgmental.
It's just like one commit in the last 30 days or whatever we get to, something like that.
From a speed perspective, 5.6, what do you think?
I think it's great.
It's so fast and it's very to the point.
It doesn't write too much.
I like 2 because it has more It has more concrete details, but I also don't like the idea of necessarily saying it's alive versus dead versus it's not.
It should just use the concrete details to tell you what's going on so you can see it.
In a second, I'm just going to set it off and see what it does.
All right, I want you to make the best possible decisions and just use LFG and a goal to just make this thing.
And show me what it would look like for...
let's say Quora and Monologue.
So show me on a page.
So what is LFG and what is Goal?
So LFG is, again, this is our compound engineering plugin.
It's a plugin by Kieran Klassen, who runs Quora, which is just, he's like an insanely good AI engineer and he's just taken all of the stuff that he knows and put it into a plugin.
And LFG, it basically just loops through the whole cycle of plan, like execute work, review the work, compound the learnings, and then just keep going until it's made.
And then goal is Codex's version of like give the model a high-level long-term goal that it just like keeps going until it's achieved.
Like for example, one of the things I'm doing, I told you I was doing model training.
I'm training a model to do copy edits.
And this goal is four hours.
It's been going for four hours and I just like let it go.
But four hours is honestly very short.
Like I over the weekend, I had one or two that went for like 20 hours each.
And so it's just a really nice thing to be able to say, here's where I want you to get to.
Here's verifiable criteria that would tell me that you are actually done with this.
I'm going to go do something else.
And or theoretically, I'm going to go do something else.
What I've actually found, I don't know if you have this, but I've actually found that I'm incredibly addicted to just like watching the stream, which I hate.
But I just I just am like that for whatever reason.
So anyway, this is another nice thing about 5.6 that's pretty new is it does this like design checkpoint.
So it's it's really they're trying to make a better design.
And I think it's it's not.
perfect.
Like it always wants to do warm paper backgrounds for some reason.
I don't know why.
So it's, it's like better, but it's not perfect.
I give it like a B, you know, where previous models were like a C or D.
Um, so yeah.
Well, at least it asks, right?
At least it, at least it asks.
Yeah.
At least, you know, at least it's thinking about warm paper and I can be like, no, I want cool paper, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think in the past it jumps to conclusions and that's when you have the same looking website as everyone else.
So I think what they're probably doing is they're giving you an opportunity to add more context before they continue.
Think of any SaaS tool that you use.
So we made proof, which is document editing, but there's email, there's CRMs, there's any of that stuff.
Any software that you use every day would be better if it was built to be used inside of something like this, inside of something like Codex, where you can bring your agent to it and your agent has all the context on you, on who you are and what you do.
And it's not...
You're not designing it so that it's a CLI and the agent just like you're just delegating it and the agent is in using the CLI without you.
It's designed for you and the agent to be working on it together inside of Codex.
You want to be able to bring your agent to the software that you use and have you and the agent collaborating on the same surface.
And this is what programmers already know about the best way to build apps.
Like the reason the in-app browser is a thing is when you were building an app, you want to be able to use the local app that you're making in the same place that your agent uses it.
So the feedback loop is shorter.
Same thing is true for any kind of knowledge work.
And I think there's a massive opportunity for anyone that understands that to just make apps that are built that way because most apps are not designed for that.
And do you think that customers are going to be looking for these agent-native apps?
If they're smart.
So I think it's...
I think that there is a crew of early adopters that is starting to figure it out.
And it will take a while for it to be totally mainstream.
But to me, that is the opportunity is to start establishing yourself as making an app that's codex native for a particular category so that when it is really mainstream, you're the place people go.
I would start trying to rank for that.
you know, having landing pages around using it inside of Codex and all that kind of stuff.
Because, you know, having a lens into all these companies, I think a lot of the model companies and just general like big AI companies like see this as a trajectory that things are starting to go.
And yeah, it's going to be a big deal.
And one of the cool things about it is most SaaS companies are there like now they're installing agents.
in their products.
So they have to pay token costs.
In this world, you're just a SaaS provider.
You're just hosting software.
So there's no token costs.
And so your margins are back to being a regular software business instead of being an AI business, which I think is great.
Yeah, I mean, it's also great for the people who want to take the non-venture-backed route.
Totally.
I think there's a lot of us who are kind of like, hey, I'd love to build a business that makes $10 million a year and the costs are low and stuff like that.
I think a lot of people were looking at SaaS and these agent-native SaaS's and they're like, okay, wow, great, this company's making $80 million a year in revenue but they're spending $60 million a year in tokens.
For some people that's interesting but some others not.
these codec specific or apps are probably going to do well.
The only thing I'm thinking about is from a distribution perspective, it's not similar to the mobile era when you had the app store.
I remember I built an app in 2013 and we...
were featured on the App Store and we were getting 25,000 downloads a day just from the features on the App Store.
I think what would be really cool is if the codexes and the clods of the world start promoting these apps that are specific to making the experience better.
I bet that they will.
OpenAI has launched already three or four different app stores, literally.
Every year they have a new app store play because I think they realize that playbook works really well.
It's incredible to have an app store because then you have an ecosystem and you have people building an ecosystem.
And it's not just about stuff you can build.
It's about the value you unlock for everyone else building on your platform.
And I bet you within a year, the opening eyes in the Anthropics of the world will have app stores.
for apps that are built specifically to be used inside of these services.
Maybe even cursor too.
I don't have any insight on any of this.
It's just too good of a business opportunity.
And it's just a logical thing if you grew up in the app era and saw how good the app store was to want to bring that to the agent era.
All right.
See?
Warm paper background.
Turn around.
Let's go.
Interesting.
Your inbox.
What are we looking at?
So.
This is its take on this is the thing is they've they've they have improved the design here, but it's a certain kind of design that this sort of flat aesthetic I don't think is quite right for this.
But anyway, so what we're looking at is a mocked up version of the embed that we were talking about where you can see, OK, on the core about page, 26 commits last 30 days.
And you can see like how active it is.
I don't know if commits is really the right word.
And especially if we're going to call it turnaround, that's kind of an interesting one.
But it's essentially like a, it's like a, it's a status page for the vibe code era to show you, okay, yeah, there's a lot of activity happening in this, in this project or not.
And I don't quite like the, the initial visual implementation, but you can kind of see what it's getting at.
Totally.
Yeah, I think it's like 75% of the way there.
Yeah, it's an it's enough that I can kind of see it.
And I might be able to like, I could probably publish a landing page that's like sort of like this.
But to be honest with you, at this point, I would probably I would I would go to Claude for the actual design, and then port it back in here.
Because I still think that Claude has a has a better sense, especially Fable.
But even 4.8 would be better at this.
And I think for a product like this, being able to see it at a glance and understand what it is is the most important thing.
And I still think that Opus and just Claude in general is ahead on that one.
And while we're waiting for this, what are your thoughts on using, for example, Cursor or Codex and having local models as well?
play a role.
There's this whole new wave to local models.
Are you like a token maxi where you're just like, I use OpenAI and I use Anthropic and that's it?
Or how do you think about it?
I have a feeling that open source models are going to be very important to the way that I work.
Currently they are not.
One is I just as a as a person and as like what we cover, it's like we're very, I just want to be at the frontier.
Like I just want to be like Fable maxing all the time.
But we're starting to get to a point where even for me, model advances in raw intelligence are to some degree hard to consume.
You know, like I can't use Fable for everything.
There's not, I don't have a big enough problem to use Fable for.
I do use it, but not for everything.
And so I think as we start to get toward that ceiling where I can't consume extra advances in model power, then speed and cost and efficiency is going to be more important.
And at that point, I will be interested in incorporating more open source models into my workflow.
Like I said, I've been doing some model fine-tuning.
In that case, you have to use open-source models because none of the major model companies, or at least OpenAnthropic, don't really do fine-tuning anymore.
And I think that's a huge area of potential opportunity because there are still, for us, these models can't do copy edits.
They can't do copy edits like a copy editor can.
And it's weird because copy editing shouldn't be that hard.
at least copy editing to like 70% or something like that.
And so for us, we have all this internal data of we've made tens of thousands, if not more, hundreds of thousands of copy edits over the last five or six years.
We should be able to turn that into a trained model and then sell that.
And I think that there's a lot of organizations that have that same...
underlying data source that they can turn into like a product or capability all right what do we get here neutral bat neutral badge core monologue previews blah blah okay but like okay but how would it be implemented like how would i install this so that it would be updated see if it's trying to get trying to get around get around the hard problem let's see open the readme i see This version validates the badge, public record, visual identity, and core measurement language, accounts, authentication, persistence, billing, blah, blah, blah, GitHub ingestion, and generated embed code.
Okay.
I probably should have spent a little bit more time pushing it to get the best out of it.
But I would say we're 70% there.
I need a little bit more cooking on the exact design language.
And then we need an implementation to...
to actually hook it into your GitHub or your linear.
Yeah, and I think people would be interested in knowing how does Dan Shipper take a vibe-coded project from 70% to 100% with codex in 5.6?
Good question.
Well, what I just said is do it.
Because I was like, here's what I need to do.
And I was like, yeah, just do the full V1, man.
I think what's interesting about me, I have this, I make this distinction between two different types of people in the AI age or two different types of builders between pirates and architects.
So a pirate is like, I'm just going to get it to 70%.
I'm just going to like explore the field of possibilities and build something that just works enough for me to tell is this valuable.
And I think an architect is really good at being like, this thing is valuable.
but it's not thought through well.
How can I make it into a well-oiled machine that really works well?
And so what I do is, because I know that I'm like this, I'm like, oh, I have this idea.
Like, I'm going to go build stuff.
I'm going to go train this model over the weekend, or I'm going to go like make this little app or whatever.
Because I know that I'm like that, I pair myself with an architect who just...
It's usually it's it's always now someone who works internally, but someone who is good at that and likes to get some energy from feeding off me being like, oh, I've got this like really exciting new thing, but is good at being like taking some pleasure in taking that 70 percent formed thing and turning it into something that's really polished.
And I think that's a new and interesting divide where before we were like, I need a technical co-founder.
And that's not really it anymore because everyone can code.
I think it's about your set of sensitivities and desire to make something new and go fast versus make something polished and really high quality.
And both are really, really important.
And so I think about pairing myself up with someone who can do that other part.
Fair enough.
While this is still working, I know you showed the email example.
How else does Dan Shipper use Codex, live in Codex?
How else do I use Codex?
Well, we've got emails.
I have these different pulses.
A pulse runs every day or a couple times a day and gathers all the information and puts them into cards.
I also, I have this thing that I built called Mailroom, which is, it basically gives my codex an email address that rides on top of my email.
So, you know, like, you know, the plus format in emails where it's like, you know, you can do Greg plus, you know, codex at gmail.com.
Yeah.
So it basically uses the plus format to register itself in email.
inside of your email.
So I have Dan plus Codex and there's like a random string so you can't just email it.
And then I can give that and then what it does is I have this router thread that checks that email inbox regularly every like five or 15 minutes or so.
And then I can give that email out.
For example, we have an internal agent in our Slack.
I can give the agent that email.
So when someone asks me to do something because I'm generally not as good at like Opsi type thing, type things.
They know to ask the Slack agent and the Slack agent knows to email my codex instead of emailing me.
And I see what it's doing, but it just takes care of it for me.
So, you know, just having your codex hooked up to an email address, whether it's using Mailroom or something else, having it hooked up to an email address I think is super, super powerful and underrated.
and generally this router thread, learning how heartbeats work, where the thread gets activated every once in a while, or how router threads work where an email comes into this thread, because this is checking my email all the time, and then this is routing it to, okay, does it go to my inbox?
Does it go to my company pulse?
Does it go to whatever?
So that's another, I think, really good pattern for using CodexWell.
I wish there was a way I can just copy Dan Chipper's way that he uses codex and just duplicate it versus, I know I can go and throw the transcript of this video into codex and it would probably figure it out, but I wish there was an easier way.
That's a good idea, honestly.
Let's make it.
No, I really love that.
And I think generally this tend thing that I showed you is part of an attempt to do that, but yeah, there's all these other There's all these other little things of like routers and, you know, and heartbeats and all that kind of stuff, which I could definitely, definitely package up.
So I think this is, this is probably not going to turn into like a big, holy shit thing.
Because the thing that it's building now is, it's just the backend to this, you know, which if it works great, but like, how are we going to even show that really is the, is the question.
So, you know, just a flag.
We can move on.
Is there anything else that you want to show that people need to know about Codex and 5.6?
If people are listening to this and they're like, yeah, I want to run my business or my personal life on Codex, what are the must-to-do things that they need to get started?
Well, I just think that people, they think it's codex, so it's for coding, and it's not.
And they're like, what, I already used ChatGPT, and it's like, this is totally different.
It's not the same thing at all.
And so the first step is just download it.
Just download it.
Second step is give it access to your computer.
Third step is profit.
No, one of the things you can do, one of the things I love is just be like, It's just be like, can you propose for me things you can do for me based on how I use my computer?
Like one of the interesting things about Codex is it has this thing called Chronicle, which is it automatically takes screenshots of your computer and locally turns it into a feed.
that gives it context on who you are and what you're doing.
So over time, it's like building up this, like, uh, it's building up this feed of, okay, Dan's working on, he's working in Slack.
He's talking to Brandon about this thing, or he's on with Greg and they're, and they're talking about, um, you know, topics for his episode or whatever.
And that improves its responses.
And I think that there's something really powerful about you have an agent, it's on your computer, it is hooked up to everything that you're hooked up to.
And it's also, I mean, it can't, I think people can find it creepy that it's that it's like taking screenshots or whatever, you can turn this on and off.
I think it's Chronicle is a research preview.
So it's optional.
But I have it on because it's all local.
And generally, I would prefer it to have more context on me.
So the responses can be better.
But Yeah.
And, and they're also just, they're pushing stuff to it all the time.
Like they just launched this thing that I've actually never used.
So I can't, I can't speak to it personally, but it looks really cool, which is, it's called the review and record plugin, something like that.
And the way it works is you can just, you just start it by saying, can you just watch me do this?
And it will record your screen as you do a task and then turn that automatically into a skill to do it.
in the future.
And I think stuff like that is sick.
So yeah, I just think about it as any kind of repetitive task, absolutely do inside of Codex.
And whenever I'm, whenever I'm doing work on my computer and not in it, I'm like, how could I do it in here?
Because there's a mindset shift from doing the work yourself and managing the system that does the work for you.
And this is the same shift that managers go through or honestly founders go through when they hire employees, like all that kind of stuff.
And it's a specific skill to work well in this era is not for every piece of work that you do, but for a certain amount of work that you do, switching your mindset to be, it's actually not about any individual email.
It's about the system that does my email and that's my job.
Cool.
So basically from a...
If someone's listening to this, wants to start using codecs, envious of Dan Schiffer's setup.
Don't blame you.
Basically, what you should do, download codecs, give it context about who you are, what you do on a day-to-day basis.
Ask it to do the work of setting some of this stuff up for you.
I'd never heard of that watch me do something.
plug-in.
So that's really interesting.
It's called record and replay.
Okay, record and replay.
We'll include in the show notes and in the description.
That is really interesting because that's how I think about optimizing my life on codexes and cloud code, which is I have a set of SOPs, standard operating procedures, where I basically just put those into these apps and I have it basically, if this happens, sort of respond this way or do this thing.
And I think that's the key in the whole unlock for me for a lot of these AI operating systems is just have it do boring tasks at a high degree.
And if you can do that, that's wonderful.
I agree.
And I also would, I also say, um, don't look at my setup or your setup and be like, oh, I gotta go build that whole thing.
You'll just end up spending a bunch of time making a setup that doesn't work.
What you should do is start with one simple thing that makes your life better and that you're interested in.
Um, and just do that and then build it up over time.
Like I didn't start out like this.
I just started out with, here's a thing.
Here's a problem I have.
Let me see if I can solve it.
and I solved it and then I sort of built from there and everyone's system is going to look a little different and if you're someone who's been around software for a long time you'll recognize a lot of this from you know the way people were using Notion five years ago or Rome or anything like that where there's always this temptation with productivity software to work more on the system than the work and make this gigantic complex thing and what's generally better is to Yeah, maybe you end up having a complex system over time, but just to start with something simple and build the things you need to do the main thing that you want to do instead of making the side thing the main thing.
100%.
Yeah, I mean, we are the biggest nerds, me and you.
So we are obviously pushing things to the extreme.
And because of that...
It's fun.
People like listening to us, I think, sometimes because they can see the breadth of what we can do.
But I think that it could also be super overwhelming for people because they look at it and they're like, oh my God, I'm never going to be able to get all those things set up.
And the truth is, what might even work for us might not even work for you.
You might find ways to automate your...
life and business in a completely different way than we do.
And it's three things or four things and it's good enough.
Totally.
And I think there's also this thing that happens where you see something like this and you're like, there's this overwhelming FOMO.
And I think that's actually generally never the right way to get into new technology.
It's much better to get into something like a new AI tool because you're genuinely curious and you have something that you genuinely want from it, not like I'm afraid of being left behind.
So I highly recommend just finding something that you're actually excited about to use Codex for rather than trying to use it because you're like, I don't want to be left behind and I don't want to miss out.
Dan Shipper, you've been generous with your time, your screen share.
Everything.
You opened the kimono.
I appreciate that about you.
I'll include links for where to follow Dan and Evry in his publication in the show notes and descriptions.
Highly recommend it.
Dan, anything you want to leave people with?
Nope.
Thank you for having me.
This was great.
Always a pleasure and I'll see you next time.