The Three Codex Upgrades Actually Worth Your Time
I run both Claude Code and Codex. Codex just had a big month — here are the three changes worth the ten minutes it takes to set them up, and the one myth to drop.
- #codex
- #openai
- #agents
I keep both Claude Code and Codex open, and I reach for whichever fits the job in front of me. Codex had a big month, and three changes earned a permanent spot in how I work. OpenAI says 5 million people now use Codex every week — and the fastest-growing slice, about 20% of them and growing more than 3x as fast as everyone else, aren't developers. That's the tell: Codex is becoming a place you hand off whole jobs, not just code.
1. Plugins: stop starting from a blank agent
OpenAI shipped 6 role-based plugins — Data Analytics, Creative Production, Sales, Product Design, and two finance ones — bundling 62 apps and 110 skills between them. A plugin pre-loads the agent with the tools a specific role needs. In the CLI you open them with /plugins; to call one directly you type @ plus its name. Under the hood a plugin can carry skills, apps, MCP servers, hooks, even scheduled-task templates — so it's less "an integration" and more "a coworker who already knows the tools."
2. Sites: ship an internal tool in one prompt
Drop the myth that you deploy with an @Sites command — there's no such thing. Sites lives in the ChatGPT app (chatgpt.com/sites), and publishing is a deliberate two-step: Save a version to review, then Deploy a version to a real production URL. It'll even back a simple app with a database (D1) and file storage (R2).
3. Scheduled tasks: work that runs without you
This is the one that changed my week. In the Codex app, Scheduled tasks let you set a recurring job in plain language or with an RFC 5545 RRULE like "every weekday at 8am". It runs in the background — in your local project or a Git worktree — and drops the result in your inbox. The CLI can manage these but won't run them interactively; the power-user path is /goal, where you hand off a big objective and let it loop until done.
Do this today
Turn on one plugin you'd genuinely use every week, then create one Scheduled task — a 7am "what did my competitors post and who mentioned us" summary is the highest-leverage first one. None of this is about a smarter model. It's leverage: less time typing in the box, more work happening while you're doing something else.
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