How to Use Opus 4.7 and the New Codex

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today, we're discussing how knowledge workers in general, but everyone else too, should be using Opus 4.7 and the new Codex app.
The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
Now, today is probably my favorite type of show, when we get a whole slew of new goodies, and get to dig in and see what they can do for us, how our capabilities have changed, what new use cases become unlocked, and what the patterns are telling us about where the world is going. Now, yesterday, we got not one but two big releases, one model and one harness. The model, disappointing to some, was not mythos preview or anything related to it, it was Opus 4.7. You could feel around the communications that Anthropic knew that there was going to be some amount of disappointment that this wasn't mythos and so it was going to have to be fairly impressive on its own right. Now, on the other side, from OpenAI, we got a new iteration of their Codex application. It adds a whole bunch of new capabilities and is making some very different bets as compared to how, for example, Anthropic is looking at its Cloud Desktop app. So what we're going to do today is discuss all the new things in both of these releases, get some of the first reactions, and then specifically dive deep on what you as an engaged AI user or knowledge worker or entrepreneur should try with these new releases.
By the way, if you want to follow along this episode, you can go to play.aidailybrief.ai, it's where I keep companion experiences, and there is a whole website slash slide presentation that has all the information that I'm going to share here, including some of the ideas for what you should do.
So let's talk first about what is new in Codex.
Certainly one that people are talking about quite a bit, is that Codex now has computer use on Mac. Codex can see, click, and type across any app on your computer with its own cursor. Multiple agents can work in parallel in the background without interfering with what you're doing. And Codex can now use apps that don't have APIs.
Now one of the big ideas that you're going to see is that Codex, which was nominally designed as an app for coding, is very quickly becoming not just for coding. Yesterday I tweeted that the problem with the term vibe coding ended up not actually being that all coding became vibe coding, but that all knowledge work is becoming coding work. And you can see that very much on display in terms of where the Codex app is going.
Another new feature is the in-app browser with comment mode. Basically you can now load a page inside Codex and click directly on elements to give the agent precise context. This is really useful for things like front-end iteration, bug reporting, and basically any workflow where pointing at the thing is faster than just describing it. Native image generation now lives in Codex with GPT Image 1.5, meaning that you can generate mockups, edit images and create variants all inside the same thread as everything else. This pairs really well with the new rich file previews and artifacts beyond codes. PDFs, spreadsheets, slides, and documents now render inline in the sidebar. Codex produces these as artifacts that can be downloaded and interacted with not just as code. One thing that's really clear from the New Codex is that they are definitely taking lessons from OpenClaw to heart. Pash from OpenAI writes, Biggest lesson from OpenClaw is that a good teammate doesn't start from scratch every time you check in. They remember what was decided, what's still open, and proactively help you. Today we launched Heartbeats in Codex, automations that maintain context inside a single thread over time. Instead of each run starting fresh, Codex wakes up in the same conversation, with the history and context it needs already in place. You can also have it schedule its own next steps. Think about the overhead that quietly accumulates every morning, scanning Slack channels, catching up on email, piecing together what moved overnight. With a heartbeat, you offload that once and wake up to a brief already waiting in a pinned thread.
Now, Pash suggests turning Codex into a Chief of Staff, which is something we'll come back to in a little bit. So to summarize, you've got here automations that resume existing threads, which establishes this whole new monothread pattern, which we're going to talk about in just a minute. And Codex also has project list threads. Flavio Adamo writes, The most under-readed feature in the New Codex is chats without a project. Before this, I was literally using a project called Trashcan as a home for every random thought or personal tasks. Basically, this means you can just dive in without having to pick a repo first. This is what led Jason Liu to call it the New Notes app. There are also a whole bunch of daily use quality of life improvements in Codex including a Mac OS menu bar and a Windows system tray with pinned in recent threads, a global hotkey to bring up a mini Codex window from anywhere on your Mac, tabbed terminals inside each thread so you can run build, servers and tests in parallel, slash compact as a standalone command, and a theme picker for the command palette. Now, one note on the computer use thing that so many people are excited about, that is Mac only right now although they say Windows is coming. People's first impressions are good. Riley Brown from the Vibecode app writes, This is exactly what I was hoping for. Full permissions, no co-work like feature which limits agents' abilities, just Codex. If you ask for a coding task, it writes code and gives you a preview. If you ask for a presentation or doc, it gives you a presentation or doc. Organized by project on the left sidebar, easy to create skills, easy to app mention skills and plugins. Now, this pattern of not breaking things into different UIs for different use cases is something we'll come back to as well and is a major differentiation between the way that codex is evolving and the way the cloud desktop app is currently set up. Commenting on computer use, Ari Weinstein writes, This is the first time I've ever seen an LLM operate a GUI as fast as a person and it's surreal. Aaron Levy from Box gets that this is very clearly not just codex as an update for developers, but is thinking about how knowledge workers in general will work in the future. He writes, The new codex is another jump in what agents will look like for knowledge workers. Agents that can code, work with tools, and use computers can begin to execute long-running tasks in the background for all areas of work. This can mean drafting reports, setting up data rooms for a merger, reviewing contracts, helping onboard clients, generating marketing assets, processing invoices and more.