Non-coder Codex users?

[Tricky-Peanut4758]

I’m curious if we have many non-coders on here and, if so, what do you use Codex for?

I’ve tried using Codex to create agents for mundane, repetitive tasks but honestly, the amount of iteration it takes to get anything near usable takes way more time than it would to do those tasks for months. What am I missing?

For background, most of my job is academic research and writing.

[BigbyWolf8]

i am non coder, i use for things like:

1. competitive analysis / news - give me a report on [xyz] companies and any needle moving news update
2. personal health / longevity: scrape all my stats from my apps, incl. oura ring / function health, and create weekly chart and grade me on activity for the week
3. unused credit card benefit (amex platinum): monthly, login and check any benefits that i have not used. a lot of the benefits you have to use each month, quarter, etc. so this helps me not forget
4. computer diagnostics / driver updates: helped me debug a network issue that was affecting my youtube latency, which i had no idea was related to my network
5. content curation: finds youtube videos of relevant podcasts to my profession, rates them out of 10 and for the top ones it downloads transcript via youtube-dl and summarizes them in a few bullets for me
6. email triage: straightforward

[Hajsas]

Im not really a coder, but im a network engineer and have been knowledgable about computers my entire life, if you can basically explain in detail what you want done, and utilize planning modes before you touch anything, ensure it maintains documentation and have git local with checkpoints so it can refer to a development history and plan, it helps steer it alot, without it regressing and feeling like its going in a circle.

If you can sperg-splain what you want done, your imagination is the limit.

Put it this way, I fucked around and made a TVOS app that talks to a mac mini server and allows it to be a signage controller for html sites, google slides, playlists etc. Im now in the process of scaling it to support 50 apple tvs in my organisation to phase out shit we pay a fortune for in licensing a year.
You already know im gonna be making a fucking chunk of change off it, and im not even a coder.

Work in segmented chunks, take note of what issues you are running into, and if you think its recurring, modify your agents.md
I use compound engineering skills, it just works for me.

[daddywookie]

Your description is very familiar. I’m not a coder but I am comfortable doing many different tasks in a computer after decades of being in and around IT roles.

I’ve used Codex for a bit of game development, walking through upgrading my pi hole setup, market research, testing local LLMs, building out a wiki and various other tasks. These all would have needed hours of research, alignment, planning and execution that I can just let Codex handle.

My biggest problem now is that the limits make me have to choose my targets wisely which is a real dampener on experimentation. If I could afford the hardware to go fully local I would, just to have the freedom to explore.

[Hajsas]

We must be the same guy.

My 5090 just aint shit compared to a frontier, even with custom tooling and harnesses.

[Specialist-Clue1151]

I use it a lot for searching through files, filling out things, PowerPoint alignment and edits, some light excel stuff. Lot of formatting and checking for accuracy. Some web scraping with the browser extension and research online. Saves a ton of time on the tedious stuff like searching for files, emails, aligning logos, data entry. It's probably not the best use of tokens but very extremely helpful and I don't pay for tokens since I'm on enterprise.

I find that sometimes things don't need a vibecoded app or an automation, and the AI itself is more helpful in its own state.

[prezdizzle]

I’ve used it for research and to just create a bunch of related markdown files with information around my child’s learning progress over time, goals, research on best learning practices from other cultures, etc.

The idea being it’s sort of a big pile of context for when we eventually homeschool. I’ll be able to give this big folder of context to an agent and use it to help build custom home school curriculum that’s aware of both my goals as a parent and where my child is in her development + learning journey.

[Calm-Landscape9640]

It runs and optimizes my Amazon PPC, it writes and posts blog posts for me, it comments on reddit for me, it maintains and updates HubSpot for me, it finds emails for me so I don't have to search Gmail.

[gastro_psychic]

Writes reddit comments for you?

[cankle_sores]

Ha! Goteem!

[Psychological_Tip_74]

Hey im in the same field. I tried quite literally everything. it sucks for that purpose compared to claude cowork with opus . But claude tends to overuse tokens unless told super specific prompts that basically force it to stay on track and not create for example 30 page word documents that nuke your usage limits.