Hamel Husain demos a Codex capability most people don’t know about: Codex can control itself — spawning parallel threads, letting them coordinate, and driving computer use. ~5 minutes on his own channel.

The demo setup

  • Working project: AEO — optimizing one of his websites for AI discovery (making it findable by AI search engines)
  • Codex listed 16 high-value tasks from the project file (aeo-to-do.md) — the fuel for the orchestration demo

Spawning threads

  • Prompt: “Open a new thread for each task and explain how you’d tackle it, along with prerequisite steps” — Codex spawns 16 parallel threads in the sidebar
  • Codex can also rename and delete threads itself
  • Value: manage separate tasks completely independently, no window-jumping

Threads talking to threads

  • Inside any thread you can query another: “What is AEO 1 doing? Does it need any help?”
  • Great for orchestrating when things get stuck, or starting a supervisor thread that manages others and unblocks them

Steering and queues

  • Ask for a status table when threads finish: which can run in parallel, which need human intervention or input
  • Broadcast guidance to all threads: “Direct threads that can work independently with computer use to start — don’t start work if you need other threads to finish first”
  • One thread inventories the active threads and coordinates the rest — “this starts to become super powerful”

Computer use

  • A thread opens the browser itself: checks Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console, etc.
  • It tells Hamel what it needs (accepting a verification), keeps going, and reports when it gets stuck

Mobile

  • Same thread list appears on your phone — manage all parallel threads remotely, even away from the computer

“You can have Codex control Codex and become a power user to do a lot of things faster and parallelize your work.”

Watch on YouTube — full summary in the vault note.