Developer Jason Liu has pushed Codex far beyond its original coding focus into what he calls a full "operating system" for knowledge work. The latest Codex app upgrades represent the first tool that makes this broader mode feel native. He now uses it for presentations in Slidev, note-taking with voice input, and producing artifacts like HTML files, PDFs, and spreadsheets.

The behavioral shift came from learning to give work a durable thread with compaction—compressing long-running conversations so they can continue without carrying every old message. He maintains pinned threads for each major workstream: Chief of Staff, Agents SDK, OpenAI CLI, Codex for open source, and one just to monitor Twitter. These megathreads accumulate history, preferences, and old decisions he does not want to recreate every time he returns.

Voice input changed everything because it gets the unedited version of his thinking into the agent. Combined with steering—injecting directions while Codex is already working—the unit of work becomes a small operating loop rather than one prompt and one answer. Memory lives in an Obsidian vault synced to GitHub, where diffs become a review surface for what the agent deemed important enough to remember.