usecases.sh
OpenAI's coding agent, in the terminal, the cloud and the desktop app. 8 real use cases so far, most often for software & devops, games & simulations, science, security & hardware. Each links to its source and comes with a prompt to try.
8 use cases · 3 kinds of job · updated Oct 15, 2026
A film photographer had Codex vibe-code an iPhone app that switches an enlarger through a $20 Shelly smart plug; he has printed with it for months in a bathroom darkroom and measured timing to about 0.1 seconds.
Lorenzo Massaro, CTO of Eternal Tech, says a simple Codex UX check launched from VS Code spawned 826 child tasks on a larger model over 20 days and billed roughly $78,000 to a company card before anyone noticed.
Alice Moore of Builder.io ran 16 GrokBot bots around her Claude Code and Codex threads for a week and merged 78 PRs, then quit after idle bots burned $100 over one weekend.
Amara Graham asked Codex and GitHub Copilot to each build a React proof of concept that views a PDF and extracts its fields; Codex got there after a few rounds, Copilot only once web access was switched on.
The agent-wow author gave Codex on GPT-6 Astra one prompt, create an orc and finish every starting-zone quest, on a private WotLK server; it mined the server SQL for quest data and finished in 40 minutes with no deaths.
A Hacker News poster had Codex on Astra write 20,500 lines of TypeScript turning an exported Guardian map into a playable Three.js game that is his personal site, in 37 hours of agent runtime and 25 to 30 of his own.
A Redditor used Claude Code to comb NASA TESS light curves, found a 3.18-day transit signal on a star 116 light-years away across three years of data, and got an approved TESS observing proposal to test it.
Maurice Heumann ran up to 16 Claude Code and Codex agents for three months, coordinated over GitHub issues and Discord, and reports 99% of an old shooter's functions reconstructed, 83% of them byte-exact.
GitHub
Discord