The Neuron: AI Explained
BONUS: OpenAI Codex Demo, Learn the Absolute Basics of Coding with AI
13 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Hey, what's up, everybody? How you doing? What's up? Hey, hey. Corey here with Grant, as always. Got a really exciting live show today that we've been anxious to bring you for a little while and managed to make it happen, and we're super stoked about this. Corey, where are you right now? Where are you recording? Where in the world is Corey Knowles? Where in the world is Corey Knowles?
Today, Corey Knowles is... in the encore in vegas i've been at aws reinvent all week how's that been how'd you like it it's wild uh it was a lot uh talked to tons of ai companies we have so many cool people that are going to be coming on the show in the coming months you'll be really excited um uh like enough that we're trying to figure out where to wedge great people. Fair. Yeah.
It's a good problem to have. So for everyone tuning in, let's just give a quick, I guess, introduction of what we're going to be doing. So we have Alexander Ambiercos coming on the show. He'll be joining us in just a moment. We're going to be talking about Codex, which is OpenAI's coding agent.
And the idea here is that we are going to cover as much codecs as we can to try and take you or myself or anyone else from zero to I can code with agents and I'm not afraid to do it. That's the idea. That's right. That's the goal. We're going to see if we can do that. And we have lots of fun questions. We'll take questions from the chat. Hi to everyone coming in.
Someone said, wow, I've never been so alone. Love that. And yeah, Jimmy Roland says, thanks for doing this, guys. Excited for this session. Awesome. So we're just going to ramp a little bit, talk about AWS until Alexander's ready to jump on. Yeah. What was the coolest thing you saw AWS reinvent this week, Corey? I'd like to say that the coolest thing I saw at AWS was at replay last night.
And it was, it was this giant, like 60 foot, maybe even bigger robotic hand and arm. And it was very Mad Max style. So like they, they come in and they would take people, put them in a chair, lift them up. And give them a remote control, and they could take this robotic hand, reach down, grab an actual automobile, lift it in the air, and slam it on the ground. And it was pretty sick.
But, you know, on a more serious note, though, lots of talk about physical AI this week. Lots and lots of it. And, you know, new types of data, new types of...
models, new types of everything, you know, trying to get, you know, beyond the internet and literature and things that we have and figure out how to teach AI not just the, I guess you'd say, not just the knowledge of the world, but maybe about the world in a more physical way. Yeah, that's huge.
And I don't know if people know this, but because of the extreme demand of their fulfillment centers, Amazon is one of the biggest employers of robots. So not only do they employ a lot of humans, they employ lots of robots. And I'd actually be curious to know which one they employ more of now. That's a stat I'd like to look up because I think I heard they at least employ a million of each.
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Chapter 2: What exciting developments happened at AWS re:Invent?
So yeah, you know, I can walk through, you know, my door into my house and, you know, walk around all of this stuff. So could a human, I don't know if a six legged robot could be walking around in there. I like this stuff. We got a great comment here for Jim Moran. I want that robotic arm in my truck to adjust driver's habits. That is, I literally thought that.
We were talking about, man, wouldn't that be cool to have, like, to do something with those? Like, I want my trunk lid to pop and the arm to come out and just slap. That's funny. I saw I don't know how new this law is because somebody was referring to it as if it was like, you know, coming up new.
But there's a law in California that at least has been proposed that requires like because at least at a certain point, you couldn't ticket a self-driving car the same way you could a human. I don't know if that has been addressed, but this law was aiming to address that, where it's like somebody has to, you know, from the company has to comply with like. Yeah.
police basically say hey this robot car is doing something i'll take the fines somebody's got to be that guy somebody's got to take the lines right speaking of while i'm out of town waymo came to st louis grant really okay listeners yep listeners cory's from st louis famously yeah and Now Waymo's in your town. All right, you're going to be taking it.
As of like this week, for the first little bit, they'll have humans driving the cars around while us humans get used to seeing them. But I'm so excited. I'm so excited to be able to take one at home now. And I tried to take, what's the other one? Zoop? Zooks, which is from Amazon, actually.
Yeah, and they're here in Vegas, but there were only like four stops directly on the strip, and it never coincided with where I was or where I was going. That's an interesting car because there's a steering wheel, sort of like a bus, right? Yes. Yeah. It's neat, but it looks like we'll have the little Jaguars in St.
Louis, so I'm excited and anxious to see people freak out about them in the Midwest because they absolutely will for a hot minute. So I'm going to go ahead and just chat a little bit about Codex for people who don't know. Looks like Alexander is ready to come on, so I'll just give a quick intro and then we'll let him tell you about Codex because he'll tell you much better than I will.
So just real quick. As a reminder, the idea of this is that we're going to try to go from zero to hero with Codex today. I'm going to see if Alexander can assuage my fears of Codex, help me become a legendary Codex agent. I've got my computer here, so I'm going to try and follow along with what he shows us. The vibe-coded god you know you can be.
Yeah, I want to become the vibe-building God that I know I can be, that I know I have inside me. But just as a question, how many people have used Codex before? Shout-out in the chat if you've used it before. It's okay if you haven't.
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Chapter 3: What is OpenAI Codex and how does it work?
Or I guess you could say what coding agents have you used before? Let's go ahead and share that while we're getting this setup. One of the also really cool things about today is that yesterday, GPT-5.1 Codex Max, which is OpenAI's new coding model, just became available in the API with the same pricing and rate limits as GPT-5, which is great. Amazing.
We'll also have Alexander tell us a little bit about that. It looks like we're getting some responses. I'm going to go ahead and I'll go ahead and bring Alexander in here. Hey, man, how are you? Great to meet you.
Hey, nice to meet you. Good to meet you, too.
Hey, thanks for being here today.
For sure. Fun. Yeah, I'm just catching up on the chat. Looks like we've got some people using Codex, people using other stuff.
Cool. Yeah, yeah. So this is good. So you're going to show us how to become Codex masters today, Alexander. No pressure.
All right, all right. Hopefully it goes well, yeah.
For people who don't know, Alexander is the product lead on Codex. Alexander, can you tell us a little bit about it and what it is and what people should know about it?
Yeah, for sure. Okay. So Codex is OpenAI's coding agent. We launched a research preview earlier this year. It worked in the cloud on its own computer. And since then, we've just been like massively improving it. So right now, the most popular place to use Codex is in your IDE. So like in VS Code, a bunch of people pop it up. I'll show you this. Got a VS Code extension.
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Chapter 4: How can beginners effectively use Codex?
If we look at what happened under the hood, like, so the UI is kind of compressing this because I don't really care about all these steps that the agent took. But under the hood, what happened is a model GPT 5.1 codex max basically received this query and then it was told, hey, you're actually running as an agent in this
folder repository with a bunch of files, go figure out how to solve this user request. So what it did is first it was like, what files are in here? So it ran LS, which is a command that shows you the folders. From there, it's like, OK, let me go search for the jump function. So it's running various commands. It's like, oh, RG is a command to search for things. So it searched for the word jump.
And then OK, it found the jump. It found the command that does it. It read the file that contains the jump command.
and then it saw the like oh like there's this variable called jump impulse which seems very high let me set it to a new value um and so then it made that code change um so you know normally i don't have to know any of that i just know that like it worked and then it tells me that lowered the value but behind the scenes what it was able to do was to like use my computer actually Right?
And so this is what we call the hardness. So when I was showing you all this code... Oh, let's test the jump, by the way. Oh, wait. I need to refresh.
Yeah, you need to refresh it.
Yeah, there you go. Okay, we did it. Also, this cowboy hat. That's good. Oh, yeah.
Kind of like a fedora, actually. A little bit fedora-coded there.
You know, see if the windmill planting works. Sick. There you go. There we go. You know, okay, cool. It deleted the cape. That's just, you know... me preferring no capes all right there we go no capes so you know under the hood basically what happens what we have is we have a bunch of code where was it here in this repository that everyone can go read.
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Chapter 5: What are the key features of Codex and its impact on coding?
Okay. And here we go.
We refactor yarn into shipping features. That's pretty good. Deploy cat. I wonder what that does. Probably nothing yet. Yeah, maybe nothing yet. Elite developers.
So now you have your first thing, right? So is there something that's going to change about this?
Hmm.
Hmm.
It's pretty good.
It's maybe a little overwhelming. I don't know. Go ahead. Yeah.
Yeah. No, we definitely need some more cats in it.
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Chapter 6: How can beginners effectively use Codex for coding tasks?
It needs more cats. I have a question while that's running there, Alexander. Is there a value to over here in your chat before you even start having a conversation about what you want to do and getting kind of a spec sheet you could go drop in when you start? Yeah, we're doing this the right way, not just vibing, you know?
I mean, I don't know if we can wait for that to finish or not, but I can show you.
We'll leave it up. Yeah, let's switch back to you and let's see how you do it. So everyone saw the amateur version, the zero version. Now let's see the hero version. Cool. All right.
Give me one second to open stuff.
Okay. Okay. Perry Kivolowitz, Was there. Perry Kivolowitz, Was there, there was one more question we mentioned we missed it was it was interesting, I think.
Perry Kivolowitz, I can't find.
Oh, Nathan Webber, who asked the question about bloggers, suggested I ought to try and start one fail forward with me. That's a great way to learn. I've actually thought about that.
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Chapter 7: What strategies can help when Codex encounters issues?
And that's what I'm trying to do on this. I know a little bit more about this type of stuff than I'm letting on. Basically, you should totally write a blog where you are failing in real time and sharing your learnings with people because that is how you, like by teaching others, it creates a pathway in your brain that basically allows you to learn it by repeating it.
So it's like you can't really, one of the famous lines is if you can't teach it, you don't really know it. So you sharing it with others reinforces the pathway in your brain that teaches you to learn from your failings. It's a great idea. You should totally do it.
Cool. Can you put my screen up? There we go. All right. So what I'm going to do is I'll show you three things. First, I'm going to show you just some slightly more realistic change that I might ask for, what that might look like.
Then I'll show you how we would do like sort of a longer, harder task, but I mean, we're not gonna have time to watch it run, cause it'll take longer, but we can talk about how to do that. And then lastly, I'll show you some fun, just like screenshots of like us using Codex that I just, I just this morning, I just from shipping linear integration that we shipped. Yeah.
So let's say that, you know, I am working on the Codex CLI app and we have this command called slash status. And, you know, looking at this, it says that you should go here to, like, see more about your up-to-date rate limits. And I kind of wish that this string was, like, down here so that we could just tell people the status earlier.
You know, I don't want a user to have to read this text every time, right?
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Chapter 8: How do you ensure code security when using AI tools like Codex?
Yeah, for sure.
I'm going to show this editing in the VS Code extension just because that's where we've been working. Yeah. But so I'm going to copy that and I'll go into VS code where I have opened the codex code. So. This is I have dragged. You can actually. This is a fun fact. So you have codex down here. This is where it is in VS code. It's much easier to find. Yeah, it's so much better.
Yeah, but anyway, so I can. I've dragged it here just kind of happened to like it on the right side, so I'm going to ask it to make a change. I'm going to say when I run slash status the command. The string and I'll just quote it. You know roughly. Yeah, let's clean this up slightly. Uh. Shows up. At the top of the output.
let's move it to the bottom so users you know don't have to read that immediately nice it's extra info and this is this is personal not not everyone i know writes this way yeah but i like to give the model like a lot of information about um what i'm thinking and i often will say things like i don't really know where it should be just like figure it out so like here
And then like put in a new version where I had moved the string to where I want. But the way that I use like, I don't even think about what I want. I just kind of like what exactly should be. I kind of think about what I want. Another weird habit on it is like when I'm talking to chat GPT, I like often thank it or let it know what I did.
So it'll give me the helpful answer, and you can close the chat there. But it might give me three options, and I use one of them. I actually tell it which one I use, because Chachapati has memory. So I was on holiday, and I asked it, where should I have dinner? And it was like, well, since you're staying at this hotel, you can go here. And since you like this kind of food.
So we don't have automatic memory like that in Codex yet, but I'm very excited for those kinds of things. Is that something you're working on, perhaps? Um, you know, people are trying to, um, we can see Codex here is like working on this task. And so this is, um, This is going to take forever. I've been messing around with my Git state.
Basically, what I want to show here is that Codex went and figured out what to do and then it made the change. It removed this code that rendered that string from the top and then put it below, so that's great. Now, what it's doing is it's running cargo test. which is a way to confirm. Basically, it's running tests to validate its change.
Now, it still happens that because I've been on various different versions and been messing around, I think it's going to have to run a long compilation, so we might not see this finish or I don't really want to wait.
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