Ship a feature with Codex and set up outage alerts
The poster used Codex to ship a feature, handing back for manual testing after 30 merged PRs, and gave it a separate task to send notices when a third-party service was down.
Done withCodex
- What they did
- The poster stopped line-reading agent PRs and instead used a fresh agent to inventory exactly what each PR changed: schema, jobs, APIs, env vars, dependencies, and feature behavior. In one feature, Codex shipped 30 PRs that Claude and Codex cross-reviewed before the poster manually tested it; for another task, asking for an admin notice when a third-party service failed, the agent independently added Slack/email tracking tables, which the poster would now challenge and cut.
- How it went
- The feature worked well enough to reach manual testing, but after 30 merged PRs it turned out completely over-engineered, despite every PR passing bot cross-review. The outage-alert task also overshot the ask by turning a simple message into extra data modeling.
- Worth knowing
- Their main catch is review time: agents can produce far more code than a person can read, so they rely on manual testing and interrogation of unclear additions instead of diff-by-diff review.
Try it yourself with Codex
In [repo], build [feature description] and break it into small pull requests, each with tests passing. Stop and hand it back to me for manual testing when [the feature works end to end or N PRs are merged], with a checklist of what I should try. Then set up a separate job that checks whether [third-party service] is down and drafts a notice to [Slack channel or email list]; show me the first notice before anything is sent.
Want help getting this working? Join the Vibe Coding Academy ↗ Run by Alex Finn, who also runs this site.
Source: Reddit · Undated
Related use cases
Turn tickets into merged pull requests
Pulls tasks from GitHub Issues or Linear, then runs Claude Code or Codex in isolated Kubernetes pods to carry each one through to a PR.
Triage email by voice while walking
Allie Miller used ChatGPT voice mode with Codex to triage important emails, draft replies, archive or delete items and log action items.
Automate copy-paste and backend wiring work with Codex
A commenter says they use Codex for work that used to involve lots of copy-pasting and backend wiring.
Build a C compiler with a team of parallel agents
Anthropic's engineering write-up on tasking Opus 4.6 agent teams with building a C compiler.
Automate web configuration from coding sessions
Commenters use Claude in Chrome to carry out web configuration requests that arise from coding sessions and other browser operations.
Build a calculator web app and refactor it with Devin
A Scott Logic developer built a calculators web app with Devin, then had it plan a refactor of the bloated codebase, and feeding the plan back in chunks cut project size by about 60%.
Get 5 like this every morning
The best things people got an AI agent to do, each with the prompt to try it.