Peter Yang interviews Riley Brown — AI education creator with ~1.7M followers across platforms, founder of Vibecode and Chorus — on running his entire creative business with Codex. ~42 minutes.

The setup

  • Codex for everything except video editing (hired editors — “video editing isn’t there yet”); Codex stores everything locally and has a computer-use skill
  • YouTube researcher skill (Supadata API — full transcripts in ~1 second, whole channels in 30s with sub-agents), Remotion plugin for motion graphics, internet image puller (SerpAPI logos), hook outline skill that extracts winning formats from other videos
  • Chaining skills in one prompt: “pull the relevant logos and make a graphic” = image puller + Remotion best practices

Hooks and intros

  • Intros are filmed last, from the best parts of the conversation — fully scripted videos are going down in value; passion + guests are up
  • The BRENS framework: Big, Relatable, Easy, New, Safe — the more boxes your intro hits, the better
  • Make videos about the topic, not the tool — his best Codex video (300K views) explicitly said “you can do all this in Claude Desktop too”
  • GPT models refuse to pull transcripts (copyright) — Claude and open models (GLM 5.2) do it without thinking, so task-dependent model choice matters

Thumbnails

  • “Scrape a hundred thumbnails that performed really well and put my face on it” — then iterate in Paper (AI-native Figma): Codex places reference thumbnails on a board, in-app image gen replaces the person, style references by example, no prompting needed
  • AI is bad at changing your face directly — boards + human tweaks + A/B testing win

Voice to diagrams

  • WhisperFlow: walk around for 10 minutes blabbing ideas → Excalidraw diagram skill → “80% of the diagrams that I’ll actually use in my videos” after 20-30 minutes of edits

The skill philosophy

  • “I’ve never looked at a skill file once” — skills are test-based: use it, and if the output is wrong tell the AI to change the skill, then test in a fresh chat; improve by measuring outcomes
  • “The moat is quality over a long period of time versus batching. Batching will make it soulless over time.”
  • The biggest unlocks come from mixing skills (adding images to Paper unlocked a whole workflow)

Automations and teams

  • Codex is a single-player experience; for always-on automations he uses Claude agents in Slack (a CMO agent, “Content Man”, even a Peter Yang bot trained on this channel’s videos)
  • Teams of agents in Slack is still unsolved — Anthropic’s approach (a central “god” agent) vs each agent as a team member

“The more skills you use, the more you’ll realize that you can mix and match.”