build an app with codex in 25 mins (real workflow)

Okay, this is a video for those of us who have even the tiniest inkling that you want to get into entrepreneurship, build something with your ideas, but you've always been held back by being not technical. You know, I was the same back when in high school I was playing with Dreamweaver building games. But since then, you know, I went to law school. I went to management consulting. I'd had zero work in technical things other than, you know, maybe building Excel models. And I've always thought to myself, oh, I have to give up that builder identity because you know what? I'm just going to meet these technical obstacles that I'm not going to be able to fix by myself. And it's so complicated finding the right co-founder, finding the right team to bring it all together. Well, we live now in a moment in time where that doesn't have to be an obstacle. Now, I'm not saying, oh, you can vibe code yourself into a, you know, $1 billion app. I think you probably will be able to in the future. It's not quite there yet. You know, people who have tried vibe coding know it's not quite you just tell it a few sentences and it give you this perfectly functioning app. There's a lot of debugging that takes sometimes way longer than if you just worked with a great human engineer who actually know what they're doing. But uh there is this awesome feature in codeex that I've been using that has one helped me step back into my builder identity and two it's really easy to use without needing to think about a big project. So if you're just getting your feet wet I think this is the best way that brings productivity into your life and solves a specific problem which is basically what entrepreneurs do and builders do. And two, it's then easier for yourself to get out of that mindset of, oh, you know, I couldn't work with these constraints before because now as you work with this feature I'm about to show you, you'll see that, oh, actually, there's so much I can explore. This is not sponsored by OpenAI anyway, but I did get a huge box of goodies that I thought if I have it, I might as well share with you. One second. They sent, oh my goodness, a huge box of stuff. And instead of hoarding it all for myself, I thought I might as well uh share with you guys, especially those of you who wants to get started building. There's a one year of uh Chat GBT plus for free here. There's all sorts of other goodies. So, I'll do a giveaway. I'll talk about it uh later on in the video. But let me first show

you how you can start building MacOSS apps. Before we start, you can follow along. Doesn't matter which agent harness you use. If you have a subscription to Cloud Code, use that. If you have Codeex, great. I'm going to show you. I'm choosing Codeex one because they have the recent GBT 5. 5, which makes it so much faster and better than before. Previously, latency was a problem, but I feel like they definitely resolved that and they knew the problem. And number two is they have great plugins, which I find just really easy to get started. So if especially if you feel like I don't want anything technical, the way that they've built it in codeex looks quite easy. So let me show you. All right, let's first talk

about what is codeex. If you already know this, skip to the next part. But for those of us who are like okay I'm using chachi is this different like how if I use claw like what's the equivalent let's just quickly map it out. So first of all there you can think of the current AI uh as two types right there's the chatbased one and then there's the agentbased one. Okay so for

example this would be chatgbt this would be claude. ai AI where with the large language model what you're doing is just having a conversation right you ask it a question it answers and then you know you ask some follow-ups and it continues to answer so it's this back and forth that we can do all right with agent uh what changes is let me first write this out and I'll show you the equivalent is you ask it something instead of responding to you it goes into a loop. Okay, so it has a agent agentic loop. Instead of answering you, what it does is it first it plans and then it executes and then it verifies to see if it's actually done what you asked and then based on that it continues go into this loop of oh okay if I'm missing something else I need to do it again. So it starts to plan again and then it acts and then it verifies and so this is things like codecs clot code all this good stuff okay so what we're going to talk about today uh is on the agent side and this is I don't want to say necessarily more powerful but this is a different way of getting things done and especially if you're trying to build something it's great to have a colleague who actually knows how to plan, who actually acts, who actually then verifies their work, and then go through the loop until the product is ready to be shared with you. And you might already be hearing things at work that people talk about. We need agentic workflows. So what they mean is workflows that use this agentic loop, right? So that you're not just saying, "Hey, do something for me. It does something. " And then you have to review it. You have to verify, did it actually do the work? rather we're using the agent, right? That's in a nutshell what we're going to do and we're going to use codeex for this. Now, it says a coding agent. Yes, it's very good at coding, but that's not the only thing it can do. In fact, you can do most of the things you do in chat GBT just in codeex. Uh it we won't get into the details of, you know, when you should use what, but when you're building a little tool for yourself, definitely you want to be using an agent. All right. So, step number one, download Codeex. I'll leave

the link down below for you once you've downloaded it. Open it up and it'll look very similar to a Chad Gabbt window, right? Everything is usually where they are. Uh, but here we want to first set up by adding a few plugins. So, plugins make work easier. And this is why I'm demoing making MacOss apps with Codeex because already it has the ability to create MacOSS apps. So you want to just type in under Codeex official um MacOSS apps and make sure that you download this. Also, by the way, uh you can build all sorts of other apps. So you can build MacOSS apps, you can build web apps and this way it really expands your ability to create tools for yourself um on your computer, on your uh phone as well as on the internet. The other plugin we're going to enable is computer use. So basically what this does is codeex will help you use your computer. So, like the image here, you can tell it, hey, play a Spotify song for me, and it will go into Spotify and play it for you instead of you using the cursor to move it. And we're going to use the second use case, which is when we build our tool after we finish building it, instead of us going in and then figuring out is this working, is this not working, we're just going to get Codeex to test it for us first before we actually use it ourselves. Okay, so we'll enable computer use as well. Once you have all this set up, we can go into new chat and just start building our Mac OS app. It's this simple. Of course, there are so many other things that you can get out of codeex. I'm not going to cover them today. If you want to know more, let me know in the comments. But what we're doing today is again for that builder inside of us to be able to restep into that identity. Okay, so let me start fresh again. When you want to use a plugin, just type the at@ mark and type in what you want to use. So, we are going to do build a MacOSS app and then we'll just talk to it and let it know what we want to build. I would recommend setting the model to 5. 5 or whatever is the latest. And uh I'm leaving it on high intelligence. fast because I found previous versions were a bit slow. So having these optionalities are great. But of course you got to watch your usage. So depending on which plan you're on, you might be more careful than with others. Of course, I'm going to do the giveaway for one year of Chat GBT Plus. So I'll talk about the rules with that in a second. So you can have a lot more usage with that. Okay. So what we're going to do is then tell it what we want to build. Just a small tool. If there is an irritation in your life that you want to fix, do it here. So for me, the irritation is I talked about last time when I am using my Obsidian notes, I have a monthly note where I jot down things that are top of my mind and I use it kind of like a change log. You can see more about it in this video here. And the annoying thing is every time I have to open up Obsidian, find the change log and then go add onto it. I realized it would be great if I had a Mac OS app and then also a um iOS app that whenever I have something that I want to talk to, I just press that app talk or type into it and then have whatever I said directly append to my Obsidian's note of that month. So, we're going to build this here and you'll see how easy it is to do that. I want to build an app where I can share what's top of mind and it gets captured in a markdown file inside my Obsidian vault. The idea is every single month I will have one MD file and it will capture whatever is top of mind for me every time I type into it. Very basic prompt. I'm not even really clear on exactly what the app should look like, what kind of functionality it should have, other than there should be a markdown file that track these things. Uh, so let's see what codeex can do. Before I press enter, there's two ways you can do this. One is just, you know, but press enter and get codeex to start figuring out. Or you can also do slash plan and get codeex to plan for you what this will look like. I found playing with codeex that it actually knows quite well when to plan and when to start building. So you don't necessarily need to evoke the planning mode. But if you know you don't want to build yet and you want it to plan it out for you first, then do that. I'll show you without plan selected just to get it one shot start to build something and see what comes out and then we can always refine with the planning mode. Here we go. All right. You'll see that it's started to think okay I'm going to go through Mac OS apps workflow right and this is why it's helpful is because by evoking that plug-in already openai has told codeex when building a Mac OS app these are all of the things that you need to do right so you as the user don't need to go in and be like oh I'm building this Mac OS app and here are the things that you want to be using so that's a benefit and then you'll see that it's starting look for a workspace and see if there's something that exists which is really helpful. When we started this chat we didn't assign any projects to it. Uh and what it will do is it realize okay there's no project so I'm going to create one. Okay. So what I'll do is then it asks for permission to is it okay to create the environment folder. So, I will give it permission and it will start to run and use exactly what it needs in order to build this Mac OS

app. While it's still going, I want to point out a few things here. Right? We gave it a very average prompt, but it's able to understand the intent and it started to say that it made some main design choice which is the captures will go into a top of mind, you know, year month markdown file inside the chosen vault so that Obsidian stays clean while still giving you one note per month. So it really understood my intent of saying I want one note per month and you capture my top of mind. It's able to think through how it's going to do that without me having to say okay here are some top design choices I want you to keep in mind. Having said that though if you do have these things in mind you can always share with uh codeex. This way, the idea becomes more 3D, but at least a minimum viable version for you to just test out and see if it's something that you want. You don't need to make any choices at all other than give it a vague idea of what you want to build. That's the first thing. The second thing is you'll see as it's talking through what it's doing, it wrote a first pass, then it realized it faces a problem. Okay. So, the great thing about the agentic loop is, you know, instead of asking you, hey, I ran into this problem. I don't know what to do. It starts to think, okay, this probably means that I'm doing something wrong. And the API is probably something I need to look into. So, it goes into the problem and it tries to figure it out. Oh, I think we just finished. All right. Uh, let's take a look. So then it goes in and it's trying to figure out the results and then uh where did it go? Then it's finding the real source errors. So having that loop really makes it a lot easier for us to not going into debugging unnecessarily. All right. So now that the app is done and it wants to make a check, absolutely I will allow it to check. Okay. Here's the other obstacle I said for codeex ahead of time that it caught and fixed which was uh if found there's already an app called top of mind. So I built the same one with cloud code and I'll show you in a second to compare but um it knew and I said okay no problem I'm just going to rename so we know exactly which one's which. All right and codeex is done the first version after less than 10 minutes. So, it gives you a quick overview of what's happened and some of the details here. So, let's take a look at the app. Looks pretty good so far. All right. So, looks like I have top of mind. I can type into it. And this month, choose your obsidian vault to create this month's note. So, let me give this a try. I'll use my vault. Okay, it tells me no capture yet this month. That makes sense. We just started

this now. And let me just say uh create top of mind app and create a YouTube video for it. By the way, if you're curious what I'm doing, I'm using Whisper Flow uh the dictation app that you basically speak into it and it just helps you type. I'm not really typing these days anymore. So, if you're curious in using that, I'll leave a link down below. But yeah, so here we go. Let's click capture and see what happens. Okay. Awesome. already. We have top of mind, right? We have the date and time stamp. We have our note for it. So, if I try another one, run a giveaway for the chatbt merch I received. All right, great. And now it appends at the bottom. All right. Now, here comes the fun part, which is as I'm trying it, I realize, hey, I don't I want my top of mind to be at the top of the document. So, every time I open it, I'm always looking at my latest thought. So, I'm going to get codeex to fix this. Also, uh, as I'm looking at this, there's no icon for this. So, I want to be able to also add icon. And I wonder if it can add a menu bar, uh, tool. So, I don't have to always open the app. Maybe I can just click something up here and I will be able to use my app. So, let's go back and ask it a couple of changes. Can you append my latest top of mind to the top of the MD file and order everything reverse chronologically? And two, we don't have an icon for the app. Can we create one? And three, uh, can we also have a menu bar icon so that I can just click the icon and start to share my top of mind? All right, let's see what it says. All right, here we go. It's finished another less than 4 minutes. It's updated how I capture. So top of mind actually goes to the top of the list. Uh following the time stamp, we also have a added menu bar which is awesome. I'll take that a look in a second. And also generated a really ugly app icon. No problem. Uh we'll keep that for now. You can of course change it. Um, but yeah, not impressed with the icon, but that's fine. You know, that's where humans still matter and taste still matter, which is a good thing. Got too many menu apps, so it's not actually showing up. Let me just ask it. I have too many menu apps. How do I find top of mind? Let's see if it can give me helpful ways to debug. system settings, control center, menu bar only, and check whether Mac OS is hiding extra menu bar items. Awesome. So, it knows what's going on. All right, perfect. Now, let's just quickly try if when we test something if it'll actually work. And this time, I'm going to use computer use to try it. try the top of mind app we just built and add a test entry to see if the notes actually append to the top this way I don't have to actually move the cursor to do it uh codeex will do it for me all right it's looking at it and there's an interesting thing that codeex has chosen to do I was chatting with uh people at the openai team working on this which is that they don't show you that codeex is going in there, clicking on, you know, whatever it is that you wanted to do and bringing it up because they want the user to be able to do other things instead of Jack hijacking your computer and showing you what it's doing, which I think might be a little bit stressful uh for people not seeing it, but at the same time, I can see why they want to do it because it makes it a lot easier to uh actually make your computer the most functionable it can be. All right, I will allow it access. And by the way, let's talk about security real quick. So when you are using any of these LLMs, uh you should always start with setting and telling it to do not train on my data. Having said that, they still keep your data for a period of time most of these cases. So you have to be comfortable that you are not intend unintentionally sharing things that you don't want to share. So that's always something to keep in mind. For me, that's why I don't do open claw tutorials on my channel because that creates a lot more security risk than something that you're using, you know, clawed code or codeex for. But of course, you know, depending on how much you trust these entities, how much you want to share your personal information, you do have to make that choice. All right. Okay. So, computer use has done it. Test passed. It put a test case. Let's see if actually shows up. Yep, here it is. Test entry from codeex. We've done it. It also verified that the file is actually there, which is awesome. Um, so you know, this is of course a very simple test, but you can already see that even if you're not technical, there is nothing that stops you. Of course, building a bigger app, building it to support more people is going to take a bit more, but the hardest part is step one, right? So, if you've ever felt like you were constrained before, I highly encourage you try the MacOSS, build MacOSS apps in Codeex. Um because then the next thing you're going to be able to probably naturally do like for this one for Obsidian, I'm going to then build the iOS version of this so that not only can I do top of mind on my computer, I can then also do it on my iPhone. Of course, you know, you don't need an app, you can just also put shortcuts together, but I find the iPhone shortcuts app so hard to use. So, I'm going to build an app for it. And then you just naturally step into your builder um identity which I find so empowering. All right. Then I want to show you the comparison with what Claude Code built me. So it's also

called top of mind. It chose a much better icon, I have to say, compared to Codeex, but the UI it built is I don't know, depending on your taste, could feel like it's better or it's worse. So, what it has is instead of having this sidebar to be able to choose and make things a bit more intuitive, uh, the clawed code one makes it a little bit harder to use. So let me say comparer cloud code and codeex top of mine app. All right. And then I press save. Then it just saves again. It uses the same thing. It has the year and month which is great but you can't quite see what is this month's idea. Uh and again I did not share any context around what it is that I want to build. And so Clico gave me a very, you know, succinct minim minimalist version. Codeex gave me this version. So at the moment, this is kind of the difference. But of course, as the models advance and as the different companies choose different paths to go on, you'll probably see different results. But they're at the core both very functional and you can do essentially um the same things. So doesn't matter which model you are using. The most important thing is that you as the person step into that builder identity if you know you have it and just experiment right and whatever subscription you have just use that one. Uh, and you can always go fancy overtime, right? So, this time we didn't give it any examples of what we want the UI to look like, but in the future, doesn't matter which one you use. If you just give it a screenshot of this is what I want my app to look like, both will be able to deliver on that. And if you don't have any subscription, luckily ChatGBT gifted me all of these good stuff, including a year of ChatGBT plus. So, I will pick one random person to give you this plus four more people uh to share some of this merch. Thank you, Chat GPT, for sending me this huge box. I don't want to hoard it for myself, so I just give it to you guys. And the way to enter is subscribe to the channel. Leave a comment below. Uh let me know what is your current role and what's one thing you want to build with uh AI. I will use codeex to build a little tool to help me randomly select the five of you and uh we'll go from there. So, let me know how you found this video. Any questions, leave it down below and enter the giveaway. I'm looking forward to empowering more people to just step into that builder mode. So, I'll see you in the next video. Bites.