My colleague wanted a nerdy, niche tool for his MacBook. Codex whipped it up in minutes.

6 hours ago 4

Every week in the AI Playground section of our Tech Memo newsletter, we feature folks trying an AI tool, or sometimes I test stuff out myself.

This week, we hear from Business Insider's star AI reporter Stephen Council. He's been using OpenAI's Codex tool to build software stuff without using code. OpenAI merged Codex with ChatGPT this week, so this is good timing.

I adore the copy-paste tool. Every day, it saves me from misspelling names, misquoting sources, wasting time on rewriting… I could go on and on. It's quick and easy and basically perfect.

This week, Codex made it better. I've long wanted a version of copy-paste that lets me store multiple strings of text at once, so I can copy something new without losing what I'd copied before. There are clipboard managers for this online, but they often cost money, or add a pop-up and additional clicks — exactly the slowdowns I don't want.

I gave OpenAI's tool a 190-word prompt, and voila! Five minutes and 26 seconds later, Codex handed me my app.

Now, I have 9 different copy-paste slots on my work MacBook. Command-c and command-v work as normal, that's slot one. But now I can keep additional names, quotes, and links at the tip of my tongue: cmd-c-2 copies text for cmd-v-2, cmd-c-3 ties to cmd-v-3, and on and on. The app hangs out on my menu bar, so if I want to see what each slot is storing, it's all a click away.

Very satisfying. It's exactly the niche and nerdy case that vibe coding is good for.

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Alistair Barr is the author of Business Insider's Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up here. Before that, he was BI's Global Tech Editor and the Big Tech team leader at Bloomberg, following a reporting career at The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Reuters, and MarketWatch. Alistair won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2007 for coverage of short selling and was a finalist in 2013 for scoops on the Facebook IPO. More recently, he won a 2024 San Francisco Press Club award for commentary. Got a tip? Reach out using the secure messaging app Signal (+1 415-341-4927) or via email on [email protected].ExpertiseAlistair oversees all things Big Tech, along with startups and venture capital. He writes analysis and columns about topics including generative AI, large language models, cloud computing, semiconductors, online search, e-commerce, EVs, robotics, and autonomous vehicles.Popular StoriesArtificial Intelligence:It's getting harder to make big leaps at the frontier of AIOpenAI's AI-adjusted earnings numbers have echoes of Groupon and WeWorkDeath by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI worldCloud computing:Amazon dominated the first cloud era. The AI boom has kicked off Cloud 2.0, and the company doesn't have a head start this time.In cloud, there's AI (which is hot) and everything else (which is not)Chips:Why Intel is still so important: Real countries have fabsApple's made-in-the-USA chips signal a turnaround for the US's big semiconductor betEVs and Tesla:Tesla's AI supercomputer has a Silicon Valley town rushing to meet surging electricity demandTesla's Cybertruck is outselling almost every other EV in the USOnline Search:Google is losing its status as a verbA simple way to fix search: Bright pink ads

Stephen is a Senior Tech Reporter at Business Insider, covering OpenAI, Anthropic and the ecosystem around the leading artificial intelligence companies.Previously he covered technology at SFGATE, and has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Information and CNBC. He studied journalism and economics at Northwestern University.His work has earned an SF Press Club Investigative Reporting Award and, in 2025, SPJ NorCal’s Excellence in Journalism Award for Technology Reporting.Stephen lives in San Francisco. Contact him via email at [email protected], or on Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp at 415-757-8198. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here's our guide to sharing information securely.