↓ Skip to main content
  1. posts/

Discovering Codex

·2 mins

When I was a kid in the 80s, I remember watching movies where people “hacked” into computers by hammering away at a terminal. The idea always fascinated me. So much that when we got a very early “pocket computer” where you could enter your calendar, contacts, and notes onto a rudimentary LCD screen, one of the first things I did was plunk it down next to our Atari ST computer, fire up the notes “app,” and type something along the lines of:

Hack into the Atari ST computer

I think I tried a bunch of different variations of it as well. I really don’t know why I expected this to work. There was zero wireless, let alone networking technology, in either of these machines. And I was a fairly smart kid—I had written some working programs in BASIC by that point.

Anyway, this week I discovered that OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, has a tool called Codex that helps you code. I’ve used ChatGPT to help me code for a while now, of course, but it’s usually just by typing into ChatGPT and asking for suggestions that I copy and paste. The Mac app does let you plug into your terminal or most code editors (even my favourite — BBEdit) so it can read the contents of those windows. But there’s still a bunch of finding the right file it wants you to edit, then pasting into the right place.

The key difference with Codex (and similar tools like Claude, Cursor, etc.) is that it plugs into an entire repository (through GitHub) or into your filesystem through their terminal app. You launch their terminal app, type what you want, and it traverses your directory, making changes to implement your commands. In about twenty minutes of typing stuff to it, it was able to make some design tweaks to my site I’d wanted for a while. It’s fascinating to just watch it go. (You do have to review and accept the changes it makes.) And it’s fairly sandboxed, so it can’t run scripts it makes or do other system-level changes.

But man, it’s just wild watching it go. And I feel like I’m fulfilling the dream of my eight-year-old self by just typing a command into a terminal in whatever way I want and having the computer just… do it. We really are living in the future.