How to Learn ChatGPT Codex the Easy Hard Way

Learning Codex might be the most important thing you can do right now to level up your AI game. You don’t need it for every task you do. Often, a simple chatbot will suffice. You can get a lot done just talking to AI.

But as the tasks get messier and more complicated, the relative value of Codex increases drastically. If you want to automate complex workflows including many different types of files, if you want AI to seamlessly update those files for you, if you want to attack really hard problems like this one, or if you want to build agents and applications…it’s going to be worth your time to learn Codex.

I’m a philosopher and a management consultant. I’m comfortable with business strategy, and I’m good with numbers, but I’m not technical. I don’t know how to code. I never select the “advanced setup” option when installing new software on my computer. I just want my technology to work without me ever needing to fiddle with it.

As a result, Codex scared me. It required a separate installation. It asked me to setup an agentic sandbox. I needed to make decisions about “permissions.” I pushed it to the side, and focused on other things. But recently I came back, this time for real. Because Codex is just too powerful for me to ignore.

I read everything I could about Codex, and it seemed to me there were two paths I could take:

• The easy way: take a beginner course or follow somebody else’s 101 guide.

• The hard way: pick an ambitious project I actually care about, and figure out how to do it with Codex all on my own.

I don’t like either. The easy way seems dumb, because it will involve illustrative practice exercises that I don’t care about. The hard way seems needlessly masochistic, like I’m just signing up for a lot of frustration and confusion.

So I created a third option. I call it the easy hard path. Hard because you’re going to pick an ambitious project that actually matters to you. Easy because you are going to be guided slowly and gently, step by step.

What does that look like in practice? My ambitious project is to arbitrage prediction markets through correctly modeling such things as monthly precipitation in New York City. My gentle guide is walking me through that project in a way that leaves me feeling productive and empowered, like this:

In this post, you will get my entire four-prompt workflow to follow the same steps that I am taking to not only learn Codex, but actually wield Codex to build something important to me. Here’s what’s included:

• Identify a problem worth solving: AI will guide you in identifying a complex problem that is worthy of your time and Codex’s capabilities. It will also guide you in articulating the conceptual solution to that problem.

• Creating a target-state Codex architecture: You will get multiple options (no Codex, light Codex, heavy Codex) for an AI solution that can actually solve this problem for you.

• Simultaneous learn/build start guide: You will learn how to use Codex from first principles (step 1 is install Codex) while also directly building your own solution.

• Adaptive learning modules that also get the work done: After you finish the start guide, you will continue to get a set of new modules which do two things at once: (1) take you (gently) deeper and deeper on your Codex learning adventure (2) iteratively build out your solution until it meets all your required specifications.

Ready to build something amazing?

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