Christopher Lawley — This Changes Mac Automation Forever

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Let’s talk about Codex and its Computer Use feature. This is the future of automation on the Mac.

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Apps

• Codex: https://openai.com/codex/

Video Recommendations

https://youtu.be/IUkMC0NkUOI https://youtu.be/braDJ6NVv-Y https://youtu.be/ITdqrrw-Fis

Chapters

00:00 Intro
00:19 What is Computer Use
01:02 Email Demo
04:39 Sponsor: HeyPolo
06:28 Email Demo Cont.
11:49 Obsidian Demo
15:52 Background Automations
20:28 File Archive Demo
25:17 Codex Commands from an iPhone

Key Insights

Open AAI recently released a dedicated codec app and a part of that is a feature called computer use and I am convinced this is the future of automation. This allows codeex to control anything and everything on your computer with your permission of course. This video is sponsored by Hey Polo. Now most people that know of Codex think of it as chat GBT’s answer to claude code and it it’s coding platform. It’s coding specific platform but it can do so much more than that. It is an automation and productivity tool. Now, the computer use feature of Codeex, which is what I’m mainly focused on in this video, was created by the team that formerly worked on Workflow, which became Shortcuts, which when they left Apple, they created an app called Sky, which never actually got a public release because it was acquired by OpenAI. Now, I’m going to go through a few examples of how I have been using computer use in my everyday. These are real world examples of what I’ve been doing with it, not just like demo projects that you kind of see in a lot of AI videos. So, to get started with computer use, you need to install the Codeex app, not the Chat GPT app, but the Codeex app. Uh, and I will link to everything in the description below. Uh, once you have the Codeex app installed, you’re going to come over here to plugins, and you’re going to want to make sure you have computer use installed. And once you install computer use, there is some system permissions that you need to do. Pretty typical Mac OS stuff. Uh accessibility, screen recording, things like that. Uh you just need to give it permission to do all that stuff. And then once you do, you can use it. So the first demo I want to show you guys is something to do with managing uh your email. Uh specifically for me, I get a lot of receipts and a lot of like invoice paid emails and I need to keep track of those for tax stuff. Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and jump into the mail app. Now, the mail app, for those that know, they don’t have a CLI or anything like that. There is no command line interface. There’s nothing that would hook into like cloud co-work or anything like that. So, what computer use is going to do is it’s going to interact with mail. So, the goal of this automation is I have this folder right here called sane receipts. And this is where all my receipts come in at. You can see I have three in here. I just ran this the other day against 68 receipts. So this thing can there there really is no limit to this other than like your token usage. All of these right here. What it’s going to do is it’s going to go through these and then it’s going to come into my numbers document and I have an expense tracking document. And this is this is my actual expense tracking document. and it’s just going to add these receipts to my expense tracker. So, that’s what we’re going to do with this. Okay. So, what we’re going to do is in codeex here, we’re going to use natural language to tell it what we want it to do. So, uh, I need you to go through some oops receipts and then so whenever you want to use computer use, there’s a couple of ways you can use it. You type the at symbol and you could just type computer and that will trigger the plugin for computer use. But what we’re actually going to do this time is we’re going to type uh in at mail. So you can see right here it show it sees the Mac app mail. So we’re going to go ahead and pull that up. So it’s going to tell it to go into the mail app. Go through my SE receipts folder. and add these receipts to my and then we’re going to tell it my expense tracking actually it’s just called tracker expense tracker document in at and then again we’re going to say at numbers here and then So basically our this is our automation right here. I need you to go through some receipts in admail. Go through my same receipts folder and add these receipts to my expense tracker document and numbers. Add the name, date, and amount. Let’s go ahead and run this. This vide

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