Jan 16
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After his killer Claude Code tutorial, Carl Vellotti is back in the "I should charge $999 for' series to give PMs the ultimate guide to ChatGPT Codex, OpenAI's CLI competitor to Claude Code. Full writeup: https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/chatgpt-codex-guide ---- Timestamps 0:00 Introduction to Codex 2:03 Installing Codex from Terminal 5:07 Setting Up Your Workspace with Files 9:02 Viewing Output in Cursor IDE 10:46 Ads 11:32 Web Search Comparison: Codex vs Claude Code 16:57 YOLO Mode and Permissions 22:04 Document Writing Quality Comparison 25:28 Running Code and Connecting APIs 30:57 Ads 33:13 Building PRDs with Socratic Questioning 44:56 What Codex is Missing vs Claude Code 57:01 Switching to GPT-5 Codex for Coding 59:02 Demo: TikTok Recipe Bot Prototype 1:03:05 Design Systems and Storybook 1:13:36 Test Driven Development for AI Coding 1:25:55 Top Use Cases for PMs ---- Thanks to our sponsors: Jira Product Discovery: Move discovery and roadmapping out of spreadsheets - https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/product-discovery Vanta: Automate compliance across 35+ frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 - http://vanta.com/aakash Kameleoon: Leading AI experimentation platform - http://www.kameleoon.com/ NayaOne: Airgapped cloud-agnostic sandbox - https://nayaone.com/aakash/ Product Faculty: Get $500 off the AI PM Certification with code AAKASH550C7 - https://maven.com/product-faculty/ai-product-management-certification?promoCode=AAKASH550C7 ---- Key Takeaways 1. Codex CLI gives you agentic ChatGPT that actually does things. It reads your entire folder, runs code, connects to APIs, and works for 30+ minutes on complex tasks. Browser ChatGPT literally cannot do this. 2. Install with one command: npm i -g @openai/codex. Sign in with your ChatGPT Plus/Pro account, open your project in Cursor or VS Code, and you're building in 5 minutes. 3. The "YOLO mode" command is codex --full-auto. It runs everything without asking permission. Use it for rapid prototyping in safe environments, not production code. 4. GPT-5 is faster and flexible for PM tasks like document analysis. GPT-5-Codex is slower but follows specs exactly. Switch between them with /model based on what you're building. 5. AGENTS.md is how you teach Codex your project's rules. It reads this file before every task. Put your build commands, coding standards, and constraints there like you're onboarding a new engineer. 6. Store mega-prompts as markdown files and reference them with @ mentions. Build a library of PRD templates, meeting note formats, and questioning frameworks you can reuse forever. 7. Codex can connect to any API you install. Pull YouTube transcripts, query databases, process files. It writes the script, executes it, and saves output. This is real tool use, not chat. 8. Codex is faster and ~50% cheaper on tokens than Claude Code. Claude has better sub-agents and handles complex refactors better. Use Codex for prototyping, Claude for production. 9. The /compact command summarizes your conversation to save context window. Use /status to check how much context you have left. These keep long sessions from breaking. 10. Graduate from vibe coder to vibe engineer by writing detailed specs with test cases. Give Codex a great implementation doc and it can build medium-sized features for 30 minutes without you touching it. ---- 👨💻 Where to find Carl Vellotti: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/carlthepm/?hl=en LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlvellotti/ X: https://x.com/carlvellotti Newsletter: https://fullstack-pm.com/subscribe 👨💻 Where to find Aakash: Twitter: https://www.x.com/aakashg0 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aagupta/ Newsletter: https://www.news.aakashg.com #ChatGPTCodex #AIProductManagement --- About Product Growth: The world's largest podcast focused solely on product + growth, with over 187K listeners. Hosted by Aakash Gupta, who spent 16 years in PM, rising to VP of product, this 2x/week show covers product and growth topics in depth. Subscribe and turn on notifications to get more videos like this.