April 16, 2026
Bots at your keyboard? Pass the popcorn
Codex for Almost Everything
Codex gets hands-on: clicks your Mac, 90+ plugins, and a comment war ignites
TLDR: OpenAI’s Codex now controls your computer, browses in-app, makes images, remembers tasks, and plugs into 90+ tools. Commenters are split between excitement and eye-rolls—questioning vagueness, cost, and whether it’s just catching up to rivals—making this a high-stakes test of “does it actually help?”
OpenAI just gave Codex a glow-up and the internet is split between “finally useful” and “feature soup.” The update promises a desktop sidekick that can click around your Mac with its own cursor, juggle pull request reviews (devs’ code checkups), open multiple terminals, browse inside the app, generate images, and even remember your preferences so it can carry tasks across days. Plus: over 90 new plugins for tools like Jira, GitLab, and Microsoft apps. It’s rolling out now to Codex desktop users.
But the comments? Spicier than a Friday deploy. One camp calls the announcement vague—“major update” to what exactly, a new brain or just a shinier app? Another group throws shade at the all-in-one ambition: “Tool for everything does nothing really good,” snarks one user. And the rivalry meter pinged red with “They felt the pressure after Claude 4.7,” turning this into an AI flex-off. Meanwhile, practical devs are already plotting web app testing with it, but worry it could be a “token burner” (aka pricey to run) unless it can save and replay work.
There’s also a cheeky hope that Codex stops falsely flagging everything as malware, with one wanderer hinting they might return from their “Anthropic adventures” if the nagging ends. Bottom line: Codex says it can do almost everything. The crowd’s saying: cool—now prove it.
Key Points
- •Codex now operates the user’s computer by seeing, clicking, and typing with its own cursor, enabling background app control and parallel agents on Mac.
- •An in-app browser lets users comment directly on pages to guide Codex, with plans to extend full browser control beyond localhost web apps.
- •Codex integrates gpt-image-1.5 for image generation and iteration, supporting product concepts, frontend designs, mockups, and games.
- •Over 90 new plugins add skills, app integrations, and MCP servers, including tools like Atlassian Rovo (JIRA), CircleCI, GitLab Issues, Microsoft Suite, Databricks plugins, Remotion, Render, and Superpowers.
- •Automations, memory (preview), and proactive suggestions let Codex carry work forward, schedule future tasks, reuse threads, and prioritize actions using context from tools like Slack, Gmail, Notion, and Google Docs.