You should be using Codex. Everything changed this month. AI is not for engineers or technical people.
Plumbers. Teachers. Retirees. Stay-at-home parents. The guy who still prints his emails. Everyone should be using it.
Sometimes I feel like a complete lunatic.
I talk about AI too much with friends and family and I feel the judgement happening in real time. The slight head tilt. The polite smile. The look that says "Love you...but I'm a little worried about you."
I feel like people look at me like I am the guy who discovered QAnon at 2am and now I can't stop telling everyone around me about it.
But, I am not a conspiracy theorist. Yes, I am a little obsessed. But I should be. And you should be too.
I understand this sounds exactly like the kind of thing a conspiracy theorist would say. But I genuinely believe everyone should be using Codex at this specific point in time.
Many people are hesitant or skeptical about "AI".
It either makes them feel uncomfortable, or they don't see the practical application in their daily lives. Nobody really knows how many jobs it's going to eliminate, and the number of jobs it creates in return is still a giant question mark.
There's also the darker stuff, the bad actor angle, the sci-fi nightmare scenarios that aren't as far-fetched as they used to sound.
Or they just don't believe it is yet capable of doing remarkable things. It is just a slightly more impressive version of Google search.
AI is inevitable and it is already far more competent than most people realize.
The race to build the most sophisticated AI isn't slowing down. Worldwide AI spending is projected to jump from $1.75 trillion to $2.52 trillion in 2026.
Every major government on earth has a national AI strategy. The data centers are coming. The energy is coming.
The companies building this aren't going to voluntarily stop because it makes people uneasy. That ship has sailed.
So the choice you have today isn't "AI or no AI." It is whether you get comfortable with it now, on your own terms, while there's still room to learn and experiment, or whether you get dragged into it later when you have no choice and no time to catch up.
When most people hear "AI" they think about chatbots. They think about getting on ChatGPT, having a conversation, and five minutes in it starts confidently making things up or completely misunderstanding instructions.
Many walk away thinking "neat party trick...but not practical."
That's a completely fair reaction...
But that's like judging the entire internet based on a bad email you sent in 1999.
Chatbots are the smallest, most surface-level version of what these tools can actually do. What's happening underneath, the reasoning, the building, the automation, that's where it gets genuinely hard to explain without sounding like you've lost your mind.
And honestly, the tools didn't help.
In the past you couldn't use a chatbot to write files to your computer or browse the internet and carry out tasks for you.
For a while the powerful stuff lived behind walls that looked like they were built to keep normal people out.
Claude Code runs in a terminal. A black screen with a blinking cursor. To most people that doesn’t this “this will change your life.” It feels more like going back into the past than jumping into the future.
There was also a major fragmentation issue.
Chat over here. Coding agent over there. Documents somewhere else. Cowork, Claude Code, ChatGPT, and then hundreds of other tools made by hundreds of other companies.
And each of them required separate training to make them useful.
So most people took one look and walked away unimpressed. Myself included.
That’s exactly the gap Open AI just closed.
On April 16th OpenAI folded everything into one app. A "Super App". Chat, research, image generation, automation, and Codex, the part that actually builds things, all in the same place.
Phone, desktop, browser. One door. No terminal. No setup. You type (or speak) what you want, and it figures out the rest.
Then on May 5th they put GPT-5.5 under the hood. The most powerful model they’ve ever shipped, now running the entire thing.
Not just a chat window. All of it.
It's bonkers. Don't judge me for using that word.
That’s the massive unlock.
Sure the AI model got much smarter. But the bigger deal is that they finally made the powerful version usable by someone who has never opened a terminal in their life.
You can now just open a chat window and build whatever you want without having to know anything about how a computer works.
Here are some useful cases that display why this is such a big deal...
A plumber’s invoices are piling up and his scheduling is a mess. He tells Codex what he needs. It builds him a custom app in thirty minutes to handle all of it.
He stops paying a monthly subscription for software he never liked and struggled using. He owns it now and it is built specifically for him.
It's literally that easy.
A retired teacher wants to plan a trip to Italy. She tells Codex where she wants to go and what she wants to spend.
It opens the browser, compares flights, finds hotels in her budget, researches the best restaurants, and builds a full day by day itinerary she can print and take with her.
Everything a travel agent would do, in minutes, for free.
And when she’s standing in Rome wondering what to do next, she pulls out her phone, asks Codex, and it adjusts the plan on the spot.
A homeschool parent needs a curriculum tracker, reading lists, and two weeks of lesson plans. Done before lunch.
A restaurant owner wants a loyalty app for regulars. A year ago that meant hiring a developer. Now he just describes it.
I’ll give you two of my own.
Last week I wrote about a website I was building, and I had a difficult time describing where I wanted things placed.
I could see in my head but typing “move the button up a little”, over and over again, is painful.
So I asked Codex if there was a better way...
It built a drag-and-drop application on the spot.
I moved elements around the page, resized things, rotated stuff, and layered them to suit my needs. It watched every move, remembered all of it, and rebuilt my site to match.
Perfectly.
Then I asked it to recreate Granola, the AI dictation app a lot of people pay monthly for.
It built it.
A full functional app. About twenty minutes. Because I asked.
And now I don't even have to type to get what I want.
Last week my Codex tokens ran out mid-task and I had to switch back to Claude Code.
I sat there genuinely upset because Codex is that much better now.
Two weeks ago, Claude Code felt like the newest iPhone with a world class camera.
Now it feels like one of those flip phones from the early 2000s where you had to press the 7 key four times just to type an “s.”
That’s how fast this stuff is moving.
Not year over year.
Week over week.
The adoption curve is hitting mainstream now. Not because AI suddenly got interesting. Because somebody finally built the version normal people can actually open and use.
Everyone is going to be using these tools in the near future whether they like it or not.
Anthropic will likely create a super app next and release a more powerful model.
People will start switching AI harnesses like they switch monthly streaming subscriptions from Hulu to Netflix.
The people who get comfortable now will have a head start that compounds fast.
That chatbot experience that put you off? It's practically gone now.
Projects seem like remember your conversations because they can access all of your files and your code base. And you don't need to know what a code base is.
Stop trying to have a conversation and give Codex a real job. Specific. Clear. With an actual outcome attached.
That’s when it stops feeling like a toy.
Codex is in the ChatGPT iPhone app right now, and it has its own desktop app.
Phone, desktop, browser. Free tier included.
If you already pay for ChatGPT it’s sitting in your account, probably unopened.
Open it. Give it one thing you’d love to hand off. It will take care of it for you.
The options feel limitless. Most people just haven’t seen enough yet to believe that.
But they will.
Do it now. You should be using Codex today.
Thank me later.
Thanks for reading 🙏
🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dustinwcole
🌐 Site: dustincoledata.com
📩 Reply with questions or topics. I read everything.
— Dustin