ChatGPT Work + Codex Tutorial: My Complete System at OpenAI | Jason Liu

By Peter Yang

Categories: Product, Startup

Summary

OpenAI's Jason Liu runs his entire work life through pinned Codex threads instead of hundreds of background tasks—using medium-effort models for 90% of operational work (email, Slack, scheduling) and only scaling to ultra mode for complex projects. The key insight: most knowledge work doesn't need maximum intelligence, just good task organization and context compaction.

Key Takeaways

  1. Use Solo Medium model for 90% of work tasks (email drafting, Slack responses, calendar management, Reddit/Twitter monitoring). Reserve Extra High/Ultra modes only for building prototype applications or complex multi-hour projects.
  2. Organize all work as pinned threads in a single workspace rather than spawning hundreds of background automations. Rely on context compaction to maintain conversation history without losing context across long-running threads.
  3. Separate external work monitoring (reading Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn for feedback) from strategic work (planning, project roadmaps) using different automation loops that run at different intervals.
  4. Use Obsidian vault as a single source of truth for all context—letting Codex reference your existing knowledge base rather than duplicating information across multiple projects or codebases.
  5. Spin up sub-agents deliberately (not automatically) for extra work tasks instead of overloading the main thread, giving better control over task delegation and execution.

Related topics

Transcript Excerpt

The only job left is to like understand what you don't like about something and put it into words and like tell the AI. So much of my work now [music] can just be done through the Codex app. Whether that's the browser, whether that's like drafting messages, sending messages, turn this thread into a heartbeat. I want you to check my emails, my Slack, my linear every as I've used this over time. It's been able [music] to do things like pre-draft Slack responses or pre-draft emails. The work shouldn't have to stop because you close your laptop. Once that's the case, I'm even more excited for what's possible. Hey everyone, my guest today is Jason from the Codex team at OpenAI and really excited to get Jason to show us how he uses the new Chat GPD work and Codex app from managing threads to set…

More from Peter Yang