Cooking with Codex — Charlie Guo & Gabriel Chua, OpenAI

Four minutes and two seconds after receiving a capture of a Slack conversation, Codex produces a macOS live translation app. Charlie Guo and Gabriel Chua use that build to show how context, plugins, and supervision fit together. The conversation supplies the idea, plugins supply development practices, and a live German translation tests the result. Other demonstrations turn repository history into a shareable site about the Agents SDK, request an IKEA style repository visualization from a phone, download dashboard data through computer use, and build a Google feedback form through the Chrome extension. The presenters distinguish browser control for local testing from access to applications and sessions where a person is already signed in. The longer projects include a live Q&A site, an internal form builder adapted from an existing repository, and a Python package with a Rust backend reconstructed from research papers. Goals give those tasks verifiable completion criteria, while subagents, visible threads, audits, and progress dashboards divide the work and expose blockers. Remote threads hand browser testing to a local machine, and hooks add deterministic checks at specific points in the workflow. Automations then connect the pieces: wait for a server to finish provisioning, review Slack feedback, or start a separate worktree to address a bug. A custom interface called Retrodex demonstrates the App Server integration. The recurring question is how to turn a successful individual request into a repeatable process with useful checks and human input where it is needed. Speaker info: Charlie Guo: - https://x.com/charlierguo - https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlierguo - https://www.ignorance.ai/ Gabriel Chua: - https://x.com/gabrielchua - https://github.com/gabrielchua - https://gabrielchua.me/ Related resource: - https://github.com/openai/codex Timestamps: 0:00 - Cooking with Codex and recent creations 5:19 - Six steps for working with Codex 6:36 - Building a translation app from Slack context 9:17 - Codex Remote and a repository visualization 11:05 - Plugins, skills, and reusable context 13:04 - Testing the live translation app 15:32 - Memory and personalization 19:28 - Sites, code review, and image generation 21:27 - Computer use for dashboard exports 24:06 - Building a feedback form through Chrome 26:19 - Choosing the right browser control 28:45 - Three long running project examples 32:16 - Goals, audits, and thread handoffs 37:18 - Subagents and progress dashboards 42:23 - Compaction and verifiable success criteria 45:01 - Subagents versus visible threads 47:57 - Hooks and deterministic checks 50:24 - Heartbeat automation and server provisioning 52:37 - Turning Slack feedback into development work 58:37 - App Server and the Retrodex interface 62:13 - From individual requests to a software factory 66:12 - Starting the hands on build session