7 Tools That Make Codex 10x MORE Powerful

Riley Brown

0:00 Tools like Codeex and Claude Code are taking over the world.

0:03 But no one's talking about the tools

0:05 that you use alongside Codeex and Claude Code.

0:08 Because here's the thing, these AI agents are powerful,

0:11 but they're only as good as what you feed them.

0:14 The input matters.

0:15 The context matters.

0:16 How fast you move between your AI agent and the rest of your computer matters.

0:21 So, here are seven tools that I've downloaded on my Mac

0:24 that I use to make AI agents 10 times better.

0:28 So before we dive into tool number one, I wanted to talk about codeex.

0:32 So Codex is the tool that I've been using for the past month or two.

0:35 It is an AI agent tool that can create any type of file on my computer.

0:40 And you can think of codeex as a combination of clawed code and claude co-work.

0:47 In codeex, you can vibe code any project and it

0:51 will actually open up on the right side of the screen.

0:54 You can also create any type of document.

0:56 So you can ask codeex to create an Excel sheet,

0:59 a document or a PowerPoint presentation.

1:03 And what I like about this tool is it allows me to multitask by switching

1:08 the chat thread and I can work on many things at the same time.

1:12 And as I'm multitasking, this requires a lot of typing,

1:17 which brings me to my first tool.

1:18 The first tool that I use with my AI agents is Whisper Flow.

1:23 Whisperflow is a voicetoext model that lives on your keyboard, right?

1:28 I can press one single button on my keyboard and I

1:31 can speak and that will immediately be turned to text.

1:35 And so I'm constantly prompting.

1:36 I'm sending things like please can you make a notes app

1:40 with a full database and I want you to make it look like notion.

1:45 Now I can switch agents.

1:47 I want you to tell me uh any marketing opportunities for notetaking tools.

1:53 I want you to search the internet, find market opportunities.

1:56 Where could I find a marketing strategy?

1:59 What can I do to grow my note-taking app?

2:02 All right, I can just fire off these agents just by speaking into my computer.

2:08 Neon Postgress uh integration, please tell me about that.

2:12 What am I able to do with Neon?

2:14 This is one of my first times vibe coding.

2:15 So, can you please explain to me how that works?

2:18 And as you can see here, you can fire off tasks to agents.

2:22 And each of these tasks,

2:23 because we're using GPT 5.5 high or extra high, I switch between these two.

2:28 These agents can take a while.

2:29 So, you should be multitasking.

2:31 I find speaking into my computer is significantly faster.

2:35 And so, if you go to whisperflow.ai and you download it for your Mac,

2:40 they also have a Windows app.

2:42 If you have Windows,

2:43 you can download it and their free plan plan is pretty generous,

2:47 but it is a paid plan after you say enough words throughout the week.

2:51 And again, none of these are sponsored,

2:54 so I'm sure there's cheaper alternatives out there.

2:57 And if you don't want to hold down the Fn key, you can actually double tap it.

3:00 And what it will do is I can actually go fully hands-free and record my voice.

3:05 And remember, you don't need to like stay on this page while you're using it.

3:08 I could completely switch apps.

3:10 I could go click around and I might want to think like Whisper Flow Docs.

3:15 I might want to like go to different pages,

3:17 do some research on it and and I might want to go to different websites.

3:22 And then I can go back to codeex.

3:24 And then if I go back to codeex here and then I just press the Fn key again,

3:28 that text will be inserted directly in codeex.

3:33 Another thing to note, let's say I'm recording my voice right now.

3:36 I'm recording.

3:37 I'm recording.

3:38 I click on something and then I accidentally press it like that.

3:42 Right?

3:43 I didn't have my cursor in here and it wasn't entered in the text box.

3:47 All I need to do is go to Whisper Flow and I can see all of my recent ones.

3:53 So I can just very easily copy this and paste it in.

3:56 Now I want to move on to tool number two that I use with AI agents.

4:01 Tool number two is arguably my favorite and that is Raycast.

4:05 Raycast is a desktop app that lives on my computer and this app

4:11 it has a lot of different uses to a lot of different people.

4:13 For me, I primarily use it as a clipboard manager.

4:17 It saves everything I copy to my clipboard.

4:19 So, let's say I'm doing research on codecs and I find this tweet.

4:23 I can just copy all of these different links.

4:26 We can go back to codeex and what I can do is if I hit commandm,

4:31 it opens up the raycast clipboard and I can paste all of these in.

4:36 And so I can see all of these different tweets.

4:38 And you'll notice here that they even have like

4:40 a little graphic that shows which tweet it is.

4:44 And I have it set to save my clipboard history for the last month.

4:49 So that means if I go commandm and then I type x.com,

4:54 we have all of the links that I've copied to my clipboard.

4:57 But it also works with images as well.

4:59 Let's say I'm making a presentation and we're

5:01 making a slide deck directly inside codecs.

5:04 I can very easily if I find an image I like, I can just copy the image.

5:08 I can just copy the image.

5:10 I can just copy the image.

5:13 And if we go back to codeex and I

5:16 were here like let's say we're making a slide deck.

5:18 I can hit command N on codeex to make a new chat.

5:21 Please make a slide deck um and include these images.

5:25 This should be a complete guide to clawed code.

5:27 If you hit commandm to open up your clipboard history.

5:31 I can actually filter them by images.

5:33 So these are all of the images that I've

5:35 saved to my computer over the past month.

5:38 And I can actually scroll down and see all of the images that I've saved.

5:42 First, open up Raycast.

5:43 It will look a lot like this.

5:45 You won't actually have these shortcuts set

5:47 up for command N for your clipboard history.

5:50 And so, what you'll need to do is you'll just need to type in clipboard history.

5:54 You want to rightclick it or doubleclick it with on the trackpad on a Mac.

5:59 And then you can actually scroll down and you can go to configure command.

6:04 And so then this will open up all of the commands here.

6:07 One other thing, when you open this, not only

6:09 can I type in any app on my computer,

6:11 and it's significantly faster than the one built into Apple,

6:14 which is the Spotlight app,

6:16 you can actually just use this as a calculator, which is one little thing.

6:18 Like I can go 1* 1,000, and it'll show you.

6:22 It has like this like live calculator that's built into this.

6:27 So, this here is Raycast.

6:29 Every single thing that I showed you is 100% free.

6:32 They have a pro plan,

6:34 but that's to access their AI features and their cloud features.

6:36 none of which I use.

6:38 And so I've been using Raycast for three years now and I

6:41 use it so often and I've never paid them a dime.

6:44 I honestly feel like I owe them money because this tool

6:46 is so good and I just use their free plan.

6:48 So the third tool that I use with AI agents is the most visual.

6:52 It is CleanShot X.

6:54 So if you've used a Mac, you know that command shift 4 is a screenshot.

6:59 Well, when you download Cleanshot X, it acts a little bit differently.

7:02 So this is a website that we've created.

7:04 If we hit command shift4, I can take a screenshot and instead of it

7:08 showing up on the bottom right and going away,

7:11 it shows up here on the left and it just stays there.

7:14 So I can actually create a bunch of different screenshots

7:17 and they can end up they just stack here on the left.

7:21 What makes this so important is oftent

7:23 times when you're making a website and you

7:26 might actually be making a document and we

7:28 want to make changes to a specific part, I can screenshot it.

7:32 I can open this up like this in Cleanshot X

7:35 and I can use these arrows to point at specific things.

7:40 I can even use text and say like dots should be bigger, right?

7:45 And so I can give context really quickly to the AI agents

7:49 and then I can just copy this and then I can paste it in.

7:52 And all of these stay pinned until I hit copy or save.

7:55 Let's say I wanted to make a change to the sidebar.

7:59 I could just say like I could use

8:01 this arrow and just say like I don't like this.

8:04 You know, it's just really easy to give a lot of context really quickly.

8:08 I could just include this image right here.

8:11 Make better banner options.

8:14 And then I could say I don't like this whole thing.

8:17 So I can use a shape.

8:19 I could say this kind of just looks weird.

8:20 And then I could say for the third image that I uploaded,

8:23 this kind of looks weird.

8:24 I want that whole like thing that I put in a rectangle just kind of change that.

8:28 I don't like the horizontal lines there.

8:30 And so much about AI agents is giving good context to the agents.

8:35 There's nothing better than visuals.

8:37 I'll go over cost in just a second.

8:38 I do want to talk about the fact that if you hit command shift five,

8:42 you can actually take a video.

8:44 And it is really good video screen share software.

8:47 And so I can very easily just record my screen.

8:50 And you can either record a GIF or a video.

8:53 And I can just record a video.

8:54 Please do research on CleanShot X.

8:57 tell me everything there is to know about it.

8:58 I love it so much.

9:00 And so we're just taking a video here.

9:02 You can easily pause it.

9:03 So right now, you know, when I do some demos on X,

9:06 I'll often pause it while it's loading or thinking,

9:09 and then I can play it once it gets to like the action.

9:12 And these are really easy to just take some videos to post on Twitter.

9:16 Once you're done filming your video, just like the photos,

9:19 you'll see you'll have a 15-second video here on the left side.

9:23 And then I can very easily just navigate.

9:25 And remember to navigate we'll use raycast.

9:27 We can open up comet and we can go to Twitter.

9:30 And since we have this video,

9:32 we can just drag this video directly into the tweet.

9:35 Oh my god, this is absolutely insane.

9:38 One of my favorite features for any app, right?

9:40 We're starting to use these workflows together and there you go.

9:43 We took a screen recording, uploaded it, used Whisperflow to write out my tweet.

9:48 And so Cleanshot X, which you can find on cleanshot.com, is a $30 onetime fee.

9:56 If you want their cloud, they have a recurring service.

9:59 I actually don't do that.

10:00 I just pay for their local storage version,

10:03 which saves everything locally to your computer.

10:06 I don't use their cloud.

10:07 For tool number four that I use with AI agents,

10:10 it's one of the coolest and it is the one

10:13 that makes it feel the most futuristic, and that is paper.

10:17 So I can type in paper and paper looks a lot

10:20 like Figma except it's built specifically for AI agents on codeex.

10:25 When you set up paper you can actually set up the paper MCP.

10:29 So imagine we're building this notes app and I

10:31 can hit command N to open up a new chat and when you create a new chat within

10:36 a new project it sees everything that's in this project.

10:39 So that notes app it has that context.

10:41 So I can say, "Hey, so you know the notes

10:43 app that we're working on that looks like notion.

10:45 I actually want to come up with some other design ideas.

10:48 Can you please create three different options for the the main notes

10:53 page?" And then I can do slash paper mcp and what it will

10:58 do is I can just press enter and it actually connects to paper

11:03 that's open on my computer and it will design directly on paper.

11:07 And by the way, if I want to use codecs with another app,

11:11 what I do is I'll come here.

11:12 I will open this up in a mini window.

11:15 Drag it to the side.

11:17 Pin it to the side like this.

11:19 Now, what we're going to do is we're going

11:20 to open up paper on the right side of this.

11:23 And you'll notice here the agent is already working.

11:26 I'm not doing anything right now.

11:28 All I did was say use the paper MCP and it's creating real designs in real time.

11:35 So here I can see the thinking.

11:36 I can see that it's working on this design here.

11:40 I'm not doing anything.

11:41 And take a look at this.

11:42 It's creating these designs.

11:44 And I love this animation.

11:46 Like it looks so cool.

11:47 You can zoom all the way in.

11:49 You can click on it.

11:50 If I double click on this, I can literally change the text directly.

11:54 And I can actually just make edits similar to Figma.

11:58 You don't have full control like Figma because it's still like codebased.

12:02 So, like if I try to drag something down,

12:05 it may be in relation to like they kind of like you can like drag things down.

12:11 It's a little bit different than Figma, but I think it's really fun to use.

12:15 I can hit backspace and we can just

12:17 see the AI building our designs in real time.

12:20 You can see here it's making another design.

12:22 This is a little bit different.

12:24 And there we go.

12:25 We have three design directions.

12:27 I can come back here.

12:28 Hey, I really like design number one.

12:31 Can we please make three variations that are more like design number one?

12:35 Try different uh color styles, different font styles.

12:39 Use your best judgment.

12:40 And if you ever want to reference a specific component,

12:43 like if I were to wanted to like change this, I can select this and you

12:47 can just copy this link and I can paste it in and be like,

12:50 hey, and also like this part, I don't like it.

12:52 And so then I can just paste in this link which references that component.

12:57 And I can just press enter and the agent will then start making

13:01 some more variations on this design

13:04 and it has reference to that specific component.

13:06 And so paper has a paid subscription which I'll get to in just a second.

13:11 And part of that is you get image generation.

13:14 And with image generation I'm using I can use OpenAI image 2 and I

13:20 could say like let's say we wanted to add images on a landing page.

13:24 I could put like beautiful waterfall background

13:28 and we can generate images directly in here.

13:31 Let's say we wanted it 4x3.

13:33 You can generate an image and it will actually generate directly on the frame.

13:37 It's making the changes that we wanted.

13:38 All of these are going to be similar to this one right here.

13:42 But our image is done generating.

13:44 And so what you can do is you can very easily

13:47 select any image and we could say like make this glossier,

13:52 make it colder, so some frost on image.

13:58 So we can run that and it will create a variation of that image.

14:02 So that's a fun thing that you can do.

14:03 Here we see that it's making even

14:05 more variations of this in slightly different colors.

14:08 It's made to be used with your AI agents and I've been talking about this a lot.

14:12 There will be a lot more tools coming

14:14 around that are made specifically for your AI agents.

14:17 Okay, so the cost for this tool is $16 a month if you pay annually,

14:22 $20 a month if you pay monthly.

14:24 I will say there is a free plan.

14:26 You basically get like a limited amount of tool calls.

14:29 So there is a usage cap and then you have to pay

14:31 either annually or monthly and that's the cost of using paper.

14:36 So the next tool is Readwise or the Read Wise Reader.

14:41 This is my second brain tool and they have a Chrome

14:43 extension and all of my tweets automatically get saved here.

14:47 So they have a setup where you can actually sync your bookmark.

14:52 So when you bookmark something on X,

14:55 it automatically gets saved to your Read Wise reader.

14:58 And you can see here I have a lot of tweets saved.

15:01 And anything that gets saved gets saved with the assets

15:04 in a clean list that I can go back and look at.

15:08 Anything that I find useful for content, I can just save.

15:11 What they recently released is a MCP and they also released a plugin.

15:17 So if you go to plugins on codecs, you can just type in read wise and you

15:21 can see here they have a readwise integration.

15:24 This allows you to create a new chat and I

15:26 can say please summarize my last three days on at Readwise.

15:34 Please group them by topic and put them in a slash.

15:40 Let's do a word doc.

15:43 Please make it good.

15:45 There you go.

15:46 And so what this will do is this will search for our second brain tool.

15:51 It'll search through all of the things that I've saved recently

15:54 and it will give us a give me a nice summary.

15:56 Okay, so I've bookmarked a lot of different things over the last three days.

16:00 So 144 items were saved during that window and we can see this document.

16:05 We have a topic map.

16:06 So AI agents and control layers, Apple and ambient devices, markets,

16:10 energy, infrastructure, geopolitics and institutions.

16:13 It's kind of a cool like glimpse into what my interests are.

16:16 These are the things that I bookmark and I can create this document.

16:19 Normally I put it in an Excel sheet

16:21 with a clickable link which I could literally say, hey,

16:24 can you actually put it in a sheet

16:25 and make all the links clickable to the original source?

16:28 Right?

16:28 And now I can change it to an Excel sheet.

16:30 The point is I can take all of that data, which is my second brain,

16:34 anything I bookmark or anything that I

16:35 manually save with their Chrome extension.

16:38 It's a very easy way to interact

16:41 with all of the things that you find interesting.

16:44 Super useful.

16:45 So Readwise is $9.99 per month.

16:49 That's what I'm paying.

16:50 I don't think it's too crazy.

16:52 If anyone knows any alternatives for this that's cheaper,

16:55 let me know in the comments.

16:56 I'm willing to switch.

16:57 I just love that I can save everything to one

17:00 place and my AI agents can go through them.

17:02 That's why I use this.

17:03 For the sixth best tool that I use with AI, it is Excaladraw.

17:08 And so Excaladraw is a visual diagramming software.

17:11 And if you guys watch my videos, you know I love using Excaladraw.

17:15 It makes it really easy to type whatever I want and make a visual diagram.

17:21 And they have really good keys.

17:23 So I can press two to create this.

17:25 I can press five to create these lines really easily.

17:29 It is just the best diagramming workflow software.

17:33 Well, it turns out that AI is actually really good at using Excal.

17:37 And if you go to Codeex and you use the Excaladraw skill that I've created,

17:43 and remember in codeex you go slash and then you type out your skill.

17:47 And mine is the Excaladraw diagram skill.

17:49 I'll put it in the link in the description for the Excalad dryam skill,

17:53 but you can say please do research

17:56 on the latest advancements in language models,

18:03 especially with Deep Seek and how it works.

18:08 Please create a visual presentation on this.

18:14 And this will take up to 10 minutes because it's

18:16 going to do in-depth research before it creates the diagram,

18:20 but I'll show you an example of one that I've created in the past.

18:23 I used my YouTube researcher skill to analyze Kane Callaway,

18:27 who's one of my friends who's actually a great YouTuber.

18:30 I wanted to analyze all of his videos and then it created this presentation.

18:35 And part of this Excaladraw skill is it can I'll show you.

18:40 So, it just returns this link and you can rightclick it

18:43 and hit open in browser and then you can click replace my content.

18:47 And this is what the AI generated a full presentation.

18:51 I think it's 12 different slides explaining

18:55 Kane Callaway's full YouTube flow because he makes

18:58 content about how to create content and that's

19:01 what all of these slides are about.

19:03 It talks about his dopamine ladder.

19:05 talks about psychology and rhythm and tone

19:09 and it creates these nice little presentations.

19:11 Sometimes you need to make some slight adjustments,

19:14 but that's part of the fun is it creates

19:16 kind of a general outline that you can then edit.

19:19 And so this allows me to create presentations really quickly.

19:22 I usually just write down all my ideas really quickly.

19:25 AI creates a shell, then I go through and edit

19:28 them for whatever presentation that I'm trying to make.

19:31 Everything that I showed you, I believe, can be done on the free plan.

19:34 Like you can create these boards and then open them.

19:36 You just can't save multiple of them unless you do the paid plan.

19:40 And the paid plan is $6 a month when you do annual.

19:44 I think it's like $9.99 if you do it monthly.

19:47 And you can find this on excaladraw.com.

19:50 It is literally one of my favorite tools.

19:52 I've been using it as a content creator for about 2 years now.

19:55 And moving to the final and best tool that you can use with Codeex is your own.

20:02 On Codeex, you can literally build your own tool.

20:05 And I'm going to show you a tool that I made in a single prompt.

20:08 I'm telling you, I want you to train your brain

20:11 into thinking whenever there's a tool that you wish existed,

20:14 you should try and build a desktop that does the exact thing that you want.

20:18 And I made an extremely niche tool the other day in one prompt.

20:22 And this is an Electron desktop app.

20:25 And so I was on Google Docs.

20:27 So if we go to docs.google.com, google.com.

20:30 This is how I write my scripts.

20:32 When I'm doing a a more structured video, I usually write out the intro.

20:36 And when I'm communicating with my editors about what to show on the screen,

20:40 I want to be able to like add images or videos directly on here.

20:45 I like to be able to comment and I

20:47 want to be able to add videos to this comment.

20:50 The unfortunate fact is is I actually can't do that on Google Docs.

20:55 So I in one prompt created this skill where I can press commandoption L.

20:59 It opens up this little little app here.

21:02 And so let's say I wanted to add an image on a specific part.

21:06 I can add any image or video, right?

21:08 And remember, we're using the same tools that we were using before.

21:11 I'm going to record a little video here as an example.

21:14 And I'm going to press stop.

21:16 And so I can upload these videos to this app

21:19 and say please add these when I say this part.

21:25 And so this little app that I keep on my desktop is called leave a comment.

21:30 I can very easily copy this link and paste it here in the comments.

21:34 So now when my editor comes here and looks

21:36 at this, he'll see this link and this is what he'll see.

21:38 A public link with those assets that he can very easily download.

21:43 It's literally called leave a comment and it says Riley

21:45 Brown left a comment and I can include any asset.

21:48 It can be an SVG, PNG or a video.

21:52 And they I can leave as many comments and videos and assets as I want.

21:55 And I created this in a single prompt using codecs.

21:58 And I used Firebase storage for the storage.

22:02 And so in order to create your own desktop app,

22:04 all you have to type in is please create an Electron app that does blank.

22:08 when you're done, please download it to my computer

22:11 and I want to test it and use it.

22:13 And you can literally create in one prompt

22:16 an app that solves a very specific problem.

22:19 One thing I didn't even show in this app,

22:22 if you upload, let's say I were to upload an image here,

22:25 I can do a lot of what you can do with CleanShot Pro.

22:28 You know how CleanShot Pro, I can add stuff to this.

22:31 If I paste it in here, I just tried to see in this one prompt,

22:35 how much of Clean Shot Pro could I add to this app?

22:37 And I added a lot of what you can do in the CleanShot Pro.

22:42 In this app, you can even draw little arrows.

22:44 The arrows are a little messed up.

22:46 It's kind of weird, but a lot of what you can do in CleanShot Pro, you can add.

22:50 And this app costed me like maybe, I don't know, $3 of tokens.

22:55 And it's an app that I can use that has

22:57 full storage that I actively use in my workflow.

23:00 And this is just a little tool that allows me to leave a comment.

23:03 It does no more than I need it to.

23:04 It's not a full production app for other people.

23:07 it does exactly what I want it to do and that is

23:11 the essence of this last category of tool which is build your own.

23:14 So in summary, AI agents are super useful.

23:17 I love using tools like codeex and if you use claw code that's great as well

23:21 but there are some tools that go along

23:23 with these AI agents that make life so much easier.

23:26 And we talked about Excaladraw which allow you to create diagrams

23:31 and AI agents especially codecs with the plug-in can create excaladraw diagrams.

23:36 Readwise for a second brain paper.design is basically like an AI powered figma.

23:40 Cleanshot pro to basically very quickly be able to take highquality screenshots.

23:45 Raycast is super cool because you have your clipboard history.

23:49 You can categorize your clipboard history.

23:52 Whisper flow so that you can very easily say things

23:55 out loud and then it shows up on your screen.

23:59 And then finally, you have build your own.

24:02 You can literally build your own tool using

24:04 AI and then you can use it every day.

24:07 And I'm telling you right now, this is how you create a valuable business.

24:11 The more you get in the habit

24:12 of just building tools that solve your own problems,

24:15 you're more likely to stumble on something that other people would want as well.

7 Tools That Make Codex 10x MORE Powerful

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