Ep 805: Codex Record and Replay: How to Teach an Agent Once Your Most Time-Consuming Workflows

**Everyday AI** (0:01)
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**Jordan Wilson** (0:15)
As smart as today's AI systems are, do you ever wish that they would just watch you do all your work and then magically do it all for you?
Well, that's what we have now with a new feature from OpenAI and Codex called Record and Replay. Because here's the reality. As we are continuing to shift from the responsive chatbot era to the proactive agent era, there's still a lot of manual work that we have to do. Whether that's scheduling and automating your workflows, creating new skill files by hand or whatever it may be. Whether you're using ChatGPT, Codex, Claude, Copilot or Gemini. There's a lot of manual work that needs to go in to create these repeatable and autonomous processes. But I think that may start to change. And I think that with what this new feature is in Codex Record and Replay, we have maybe a preview of what's coming next as we have these extremely powerful super apps that live on our desktop and can do work for us. So that's what we're going to be going over on today's show. But here is the big picture of Codex Record and Replay.
So I think prompting is kind of losing to demonstration. And maybe that's not a bad thing. Even if you've spent a lot of time refining your prompt engineering skills or how you type to a chat bot, that could be leaving by the wayside. So OpenAI shipped this new feature less than a week ago. And essentially you demonstrate something on your on your actual computer, on your Mac right now, and it becomes an editable skill.md file, then the agent can reuse. So the AI interface, I think, is moving away from just typing instructions to just showing your work and showing a series of tasks that go into a project that you may want to start automating. And I think that this right now, it seems like a small feature, right? And I'm actually surprised this one didn't blow up more than it did. But I think this is a big step in transferring agency and workflow to autonomous systems. Because the other thing why I think this is actually a big deal, because this kind of opening eyes showing their cards in terms of model capabilities, because now through whatever magic they did, they are now can understand and ingest video, which is huge because this has been a big advantage that Google Gemini has had for the last two years as the only kind of big player that you could upload a video to and it could actually understand what was going on inside that video. So that's a bigger picture. Maybe we'll talk about that a little bit more, but here stick with me for the next 25 minutes. This is going to be a short one on today's show. Here's what you're going to learn. You're going to learn what OpenAI actually changed inside of Codex beyond just the launch demo. You're going to know why the Skill MD or the Skill Markdown file is the real business artifact here that leaders should understand. You're going to know how the shared format changes the Codex versus Claude comparison. Yeah, stick around for that. And you're going to know which workflows you should try to record first without creating unnecessary security risk.
All right, I hope you're excited for this. This is Everyday AI in our weekly segment, putting AI to work on Wednesday. So once a week, I get a little brave. I demo some live technology. It's unedited, unscripted. We'll see how it goes. Sometimes these hands on demos are amazing. Sometimes we get bugs, but that's the reality of generative AI and working on the cutting edge. Sometimes you get cut, all right? So if you haven't already, please make sure to subscribe to the podcast if this is helpful. And then make sure you go to youreverydayai.com. Sign up for the free daily newsletter and we're gonna be recapping not just the highlights from today's show, but all the other AI news and developments you need to know to be the smartest person in AI at your company. All right, so without further ado, yeah, let's get dirty, shall we? All right, so this one's gonna be a little tricky because I'm gonna be jumping back and forth between some different screens, some different things I have going on, but we're gonna try to make this work. And this is one of those that if you are listening on the podcast, this might be one of those ones that you should tune into for the video version. So you can always see that video version of this on our website at youreverydayai.com.