I let Codex control my browser so I don't have to

[00:00:00]One of my favorite guests ever, Jessie Janes, said that AI was great for moms because moms' hands are always busy.

[00:00:07]We're always doing something with our hands, and we do not have time to talk.

[00:00:10]Now, in that episode, she was talking about the benefits of chatting with AI, but in this episode, which I'm going to lovingly call Look, Ma, no hands, I'm going to talk about browser and computer use, the way that you can let AI navigate your computer and navigate websites to get work done on your behalf. Browser and computer use have gotten exceptionally good recently, especially in my experience with Codex and the GPT 5.6 models, and I'm going to show you a builder use case, a productivity use case, and a personal fun use case that I found super useful in using computer and browser use. Let's get to [music] it. This episode is brought to you by Runway, a new kind of creative platform that has everything you need to generate any image, video, or piece of content you want, all in one place.

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[00:01:46]Okay, before we dive into how I use computer use, just a refresher for anybody who's new. In case you missed it, these LLMs, your AI chatbot, can control your computer and can control your browser. Now, there have been a class of AI native browsers that have come out in the last year. Thinking about Perplexity's Comet or ChatGPT's Atlas, but I like to use browser and computer use directly through Claude or in this instance, Codex. Why have I used Codex, specifically the Codex desktop app or I guess we're calling it the ChatGPT desktop app these days? Well, it is just the best at controlling my computer. And if you didn't know, it can control the mouse, it can control the keyboard, it can do all sorts of things.

[00:02:35]So, imagine you have a virtual coworker and that coworker can put its hands on your keyboard and get stuff done on your computer. That is what browser and computer use can do. Now, this sounds really scary, but in fact, it has been one of the most life-changing features of AI. Certainly professionally changing, but it has also reduced so much personal toil and personal digital toil that I had to tell you about a couple of the use cases that I use because I literally use this every minute of every day.

[00:03:09]Now, invoking browser or computer use is pretty simple. First, you have to have those desktop apps installed on your computer. So, whether those are the ChatGPT desktop app or the Claude desktop app, you need those installed.

[00:03:22]If you want to use the browser, you need to have the browser extensions installed inside Chrome.

[00:03:29]I don't know if they work for these other browsers. I just use Chrome and I know they have browser extensions. So, you can just search for, for example, Codex browser extension or Claude browser extension. Make sure they're they're the official ones and then install those and then these two things together, the desktop app plus the Chrome extension, can really allow your computer plus AI to do a lot of work on your behalf. Now, it sounds really simple. Let your AI use your computer.

[00:03:56]But, the trick, and this is the how I AI sort of mantra, is you have to find a good use case for browser use. And having used browser and computer use for a while, I think I've come up with a couple unique and interesting use cases that maybe will inspire you and give you some ideas about how you can use it in your work and life. We're going to start with a use case out there for all the coders and all the vibe coders and all the professional software engineers, which is using browser use alongside a coding agent to validate changes. Now, this is very simple, but one that I use quite a bit. So, what I'm showing here is the Chat PRD onboarding flow. It's just a step-by-step where you fill out your profile. Let's say I was working on some enhancements on this feature and really wanted someone, and by someone I mean that all those features work really well. Now, I could write what AI loves, a smoke test.

[00:04:56]I can definitely test things on the back end. I can definitely write tests for the front end. But, what I really want to know is is it usable? Can we use it?

[00:05:04]And so, what I might do here is say, "Use browser." And there are three ways you can invoke kind of computer use in Codex. You can do @browser, that will pull up use of this side browser window. There is @chrome, which will use the Chrome extension to manage Chrome. And then there's @computer, which lets it manage the whole computer, just just so you know.

[00:05:30]But, I'm going to say use browser cuz I'm already logged into my localhost over here on the browser. I'm going to say, "To test the open onboarding flow for usability and mobile responsiveness.

[00:05:45]Please screenshot as you go and make a Google spreadsheet of any issues you identify.

[00:05:57]Okay, so I'm going to click submit and let that run. And what that's going to do is spin up the browser skill, which is embedded in Codex, and you'll actually see this little cursor start to go over to the browser side and walk through the onboarding flow. Why I think this is useful is this is how I would test if this is working. You know, I would go through, I would click, I would test all the drop-downs, I would change the viewport sizes. And what's really nice about browser use in this instance is all of that can happen automatically. I can just sit back and watch it go. And I will tell you, it's really fascinating to watch these things go. If you have looked at that little glowy cursor and watched it bop around your website, click things, test things, you know the magic feeling of this particular AI feature. Now, what I love about using browser use specifically for QA purposes is it is exhaustive or it is more exhaustive and organized than I as a human would be. I don't know about you all, but when I am QAing things, I like to do the happy path QA where it's like, yes, I fill out all the form fields, everything's required, I click next, I don't get tired, I don't go back.

[00:07:12]But you can see here, my little glowy Codex browser icon, it's going to be exhaustive. It's going to test signing up with a team, it's going to test signing up as an individual, it's going to fill out form fields, it's going to try for error states. It's going to do all these things that you wouldn't probably have the stamina or organization to do if you were like me a little late in the afternoon after coding and asked to sort of manually test your web app.

[00:07:40]And so what I really like about this is its ability to be exhaustive. Now, if I were being a little bit more organized, I would probably have it come up with a suite of test cases based on the code, then go through those test cases kind of specifically over time, so I knew it was being exhaustive. That being said, you know, side tip for some of these newer models, I actually found that under prompting these models get you a much better effect than over prompting them.

[00:08:06]And so because they're so intelligent, you can literally just tell them QA the onboarding flow, and it will do a much better job than saying QA these 25 things in the onboarding flow. So, a little tip, under prompt your frontier models, let them use their that intelligence to come up with their own plans, and do what it wants to do. Now, we're going to watch this a little bit.

[00:08:30]And what I like about what I've told it to do is it also is being asked to look at responsive design. And even seeing here, I see an issue with the um right hand of the browser. I'm curious if that's actually an artifact of how this responsive browser inside CodeX works, or if it's an issue with my responsive design. We will see. But you can also see that it's changing the dimensions of the viewport, so the size of the monitor to match laptop size. It's going to show matching a phone size, all those things.

[00:09:05]Again, things that I could technically do manually that I really don't want to do. I'll let this run, and then I'm going to show you one other use case as a builder that I think is a little bit more unique that you might find inspirational. Okay, so something interesting here. It did find an issue.

[00:09:21]Now, I'm a little embarrassed because this onboarding flow has been here for a while. Um it surfaced one blocking issue, which is if you don't select anything on this page, you can still click continue, but it won't move forward because one of these fields is required, but there's no validation code in here. Now, again, the reason why this bug exists is because I always tested this flow as a human and I always click the required buttons. So, again, these benefits of having AI test your flow is it will test failure states as well as success states. It actually bubble up edge case bugs that you might not have thought of. And so, it's going to continue through and actually work and go to the next screen. I'm curious if it will spin up mobile testing next.

[00:10:12]Okay, you can see now it's also switched to mobile testing. Again, this is something I would probably give a cursory glance to. Like I would make the browser smaller and then kind of click through stuff and make sure it works.

[00:10:23]But what I really love about browser use is again, it's going to be just a lot more exhaustive. It's going to look at things like accessibility. It's going to look at overflow. It's going to look at touch targets. All that kind of stuff.

[00:10:34]And just has a much more organized sense of what makes for good mobile testing.

[00:10:41]Okay, so it wrapped up. It found 11 items including one high severity navigation blocker, the one we talked about. And now, this is one of my favorite things that I do with AI is I just have it make me a Google Sheet or a Google Document. And it's going to make me one which is this prioritized. And then what I can do is use that Google Sheet as a tracker to kick off a bunch of fixes and track the status of them with Sub Agents. So, again, this is a very comprehensive QA that was done. I get this beautiful list of issues that came out. I can get those fixed ASAP.

[00:11:14]And it ends up in a sheet. Okay, so it wrapped up and it did everything I asked it to. It tested it in desktop and mobile. It gave me these beautiful screenshots telling me where to work and it even made a spreadsheet. Let's see if the spreadsheet is actually if I can pull it up. So, I love this flow, this workflow, which is to have Codex make you a spreadsheet of issues that then it's going to go fix. And so, it has this nice summary. It found 11 issues, one that was high severity.

[00:11:43]It listed out all the issues. Again, this is really useful for agents because it has all the information it needs to reproduce the issue, the viewport, what the issue was, what the steps are to fix it, and then how to remediate it. And then, look at this. It put all the screenshots here in the spreadsheet, so I could reference them and even compare them to fixes. So, this is just like a very practical use case of browser use that I think is really nice. But, what I want to show you is the same thing, but a slightly more fun use case. So, I'm going to go in here. I'm going to go to the core of Chat PRD, and I'm going to show you a use case that my husband came up with. I have to give him credit, my husband EJ Lawless.

[00:12:25]And he uses Browser Use to impersonate specific personas of his applications and then give feedback as the persona. So, let me just give an example of what this might look like. And I'm going to pull up Model Log and just speak my prompt.

[00:12:40]I want you to go through the core of Chat PRD's chat and document creation mode as two different personas.

[00:12:49]Actually, three different personas. I want you to do one as a product manager trying to quickly create PRD for a feature that they just got out of a meeting um about. The second thing I want you to do is impersonate a engineer who is taking that already created PRD and trying to make a technical spec out of it and eventually a prototype. And the third thing that I want you to do is as a team leader, try to figure out how your team is using Chat PRD. I'm going to give you no more instructions than just that. I want you to go through those three persona use cases and flows, and then I want you to create a doc providing research-style critique about the overall experience, including friction points, places of delight, and improvements you think we can make to serve those three personas better.

[00:13:41]Okay, so I got that prompt in. I'm going to click enter. So, just to like reiterate what this is, if you have personas and you want to test against those personas. Now, like I'm not a big synthetic user girl, but I do kind of like this framework. We used to always do this with our prompting where we're like, "You are a genius product manager." or "You are the best software engineer in the world." Now, I'm using that, but I'm using browser use and saying, "You are a persona type. Use my application as that persona, and then give me research as you go through the browser experience about what you like and don't like." So, I'm going to let that run a little bit, and then I will show you what we come up with when it's done. As you can see here, it's going down the PM path. It just put a fake prompt in that says, "Hey, I just got out of a customer design meeting about a decision digest feature in ChatPRD. Here are the problems. Here's like kind of what I want. Here are some open questions." And now, it's watching ChatPRD create the document. I'm really curious if it will actually analyze the quality of the document itself or not.

[00:14:46]You know, it's giving me good positive feedback as we go, but we're going to watch this. We're going to like speed through some of the the browser use. I will say one downside of browser use is it's kind of slow. So, honestly, when this is running, I typically open up something else on the side and like work on something else as the browser is is running its flow.

[00:15:06]But, it's going to go through and give me an analysis as that first persona, and then we're going to see it work through the rest of them. This episode is brought to you by HyperAgent, the platform [music] for deploying always-on agents that actually run your business.

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[00:16:24]Okay, so I love this internal kind of like chain of thought that you get with browser use. So, what it tried to do was do the handoff from PM to engineering.

[00:16:34]And what you see here is that the engineer handoff exposed a structural break, which is a real issue in Chaptivity, which is you can create one document, but you can't like at mention or reference it in another thread. It's something that we're working on or thinking through how we want to reference. It works in a specific way, but obviously the agent here, the Codex agent, thought, reasoned, um, that this feature would work a different way. And so, it's really interesting when you combine browser use with sort of this AI chatbot, how you start to inhabit the mindset of a persona or a type of user, and actually identify really obvious, but kind of like hard to get your head wrapped around friction points where someone with fresh eyes, again, these are agent eyes. I'm sorry. I don't know a better metaphor. Um, might have a challenge. And so, we went back to the document said I'm the engineer picking up this PRD, turn it into an implementation-ready technical spec, we'll see what the experience is and if the agent is happy. Okay, it called out something really interesting here, which I don't know if it's an artifact of this running locally and something weird being happening locally, but it did call out that the loading screen was super slow and opaque and the interface didn't really make it clear what was happening when it was writing. I think we hit an error, but this is really good feedback for me because again, I want to make sure even if we have a failure state, it's going to make sense, {quote} {unquote}, to the user. So, just to take a step back, I really love this use case of coming up with a persona that kind of inhabits the mind and, in this world, the body of your user and then have them going through your website using browser use and giving you a report of what works and what doesn't.

[00:18:21]Okay, so those are my building use cases. I'm going to zip through a couple other use cases that I think are kind of fun. So, my favorite one, I've talked about this a little bit briefly before, which is browser use for LinkedIn.

[00:18:33]LinkedIn, close your eyes, close your ears, do not pay attention, but I like to log into LinkedIn here in my sidebar and then I like to say, "Please use browser to go through my recent unread messages and reply to any that are super critical."

[00:18:57]Can't type.

[00:18:58]For Chat PRD or the podcast, leave me notes here on the others about how I should reply. If this is just a friendly thank you note, reply in a friendly way. So, this is just like the easiest way to go through the pile of LinkedIn requests I get. I love you all. Thank you for connecting with me on LinkedIn.

[00:19:24]I'm happy to be connected, but I get hundreds of these. And so, I love to use Browser Use to just go through LinkedIn, click through stuff, read it. Again, LinkedIn doesn't have an MCP or an API that's official.

[00:19:39]So, we're using unofficial channels here to go through stuff. One of the other things that I notice is I am using high effort on 56 Soul for this. I probably can use Tara on medium effort, and it might be a lot faster. And so, again, you can calibrate your Browser Use effort and level of intelligence to whatever you need. I was definitely overusing it for LinkedIn replying. Um, but again, you know, maybe it requires a little bit of work.

[00:20:09]All right. So, as you can see, it's pulling up LinkedIn. It's going through my messages. Christie is my friend. We used to be um colleagues. She's asking me to meet with her CEO. We're going to see it reply back a message, go to unreads, um and then actually filter through this. So, if you're like me, if you have tons of LinkedIn connections, LinkedIn comments, need to figure out how to get through this stuff, I love using Browser Use to go through those use cases.

[00:20:38]Going to wrap this up with a Browser Use case for the girls. Um, gents, others, if you want to use this one, please do.

[00:20:46]But, I'm going to use @chrome. So, I'm going to show you how you use the computer use, but specifically for Chrome. So, I've been using @browser, which is the side um window of Codex.

[00:20:56]I'm going to use @chrome, and I'm going to say, "I'm going to Hawaii this weekend, and I need new clothes. Good news!" Exclamation mark. "Free People has 25% off their sale. I would love for you to go through using Chrome browser use and pick out 10 items in my size.

[00:21:18]You can pick size medium. That would be great for Hawaii. Remember, I'm a breastfeeding mom. I just had a baby 6 months ago. So, pick things that are comfortable, that are breastfeeding friendly, um and that would be great for the weather in Hawaii in late July. What I want you to do is end up with 10 things in my cart that I can pick from and buy. Thanks.

[00:21:42]Always say thank you to your AI. Okay, so I'm going to put that in.

[00:21:46]It should spin up. It's going to use Chrome to curate 10 medium sale eligible pieces that are breathable, comfortable, and easy to nurse in and then add them to my cart without checking out. And so, again, this is something that can be happening over on the side. I do not need to think about it. I do not need to manage it or monitor it. It is, as you can see here, this little browser window will pop up and actually show you what it's doing. I think this is such a cool feature of Codex is that it will actually show you what it's browsing.

[00:22:22]It's going to go through the sale and it's going to pick out outfits for me.

[00:22:27]Now, we're off to a bad start because I did say that I was a relatively new postpartum mom and it did pick a mini skirt. So, I'm not quite sure. We'll see what good fashion sense that 5.6 ter has. TBD. But, again, just like think about these kind of like annoying shopping use cases that you have to use a browser for that require a lot of like filtering and interaction and you can just go through and have it shop for you. And now, I'm going to pull up this browser and show you Oh, uh-oh.

[00:23:07]Bad news bears. Look, it thinks that I'm an agent, which I am. Sorry. This is much cuter. So, you might have to be the hands for your AI. I tell people this all the time. Sometimes, we put AI to use for us, and then sometimes, we need AI to put us to use. And so, sometimes, I'm just the human verification layer on top of Chat GPT browser use. So, again, this is Sneak a Shop. We will see how successful it is. If it adds stuff to the cart that I would really like.

[00:23:43]But again, I hope this is getting your mind open on what browser use and computer use can do for you. Okay, I'm going to list just a couple other things that I use browser and computer use for that you might find interesting. One, filling out really, really annoying forms. So, if you ever have to do procurement forms, if you have to ever ever have to register your kid for camp, if you ever have to fill out an old, old, old website, um browser and computer use is really great for you.

[00:24:08]Second one, browser and computer use can actually run your phone. I did this the other day.

[00:24:16]So, if you're on a Mac, you have something called iPhone mirroring where you can actually pull up a version of your phone on your desktop. Computer use can use iPhone mirroring. So, your computer can technically use your phone.

[00:24:30]How did I use this recently? Well, I was out of state, and my Mac minis were sitting here on my desk here in California, and I needed to hack into my Wi-Fi. So, I needed to open up some firewall gateways so I could remotely SSH in. Sorry, I'm just going to really need to do so I can like remotely SSH into my MacBooks and like revise the open clause cuz it wasn't on the same network. My Wi-Fi I software is on my phone, so I opened up Codex, I opened up screen mirroring, and I had Codex use computer use to set up the right settings on my home Wi-Fi, update my router, SSH into my MacBooks, and then close all the ports when it was done. It was pretty amazing. It was really good.

[00:25:15]So, you can definitely use computer use to use your phone. And the last thing that I do is I use computer use a lot to make like Google documents and Google Sheets. So, sometimes I'm just not happy with what is being used with like the MCPs and the plugins in Codex. So, if it hits kind of like access use or it can't do something via an MCP, if you are permissive enough, you can just say like, "Please just open up my browser and do it in the browser." and it will do a very very good job. So, look, now my Free People cart has 10 sale items, all size medium, totaling $352 before tax. Tax, the extra 25%.

[00:25:54]What did it give me? A maxi dress, great. A skirt set, great. Loosey-goosey pants, amazing. Shorts, great. T-shirt, oh, look at this tank.

[00:26:04]Perfect. Perfect, perfect. A blouse, a button a couple button-downs, a little V-neck.

[00:26:11]It did a really really good job. So, this turned this started with browser use as a debugging tool and ended with browser use as your personal shopper. Again, this is my favorite feature, y'all. If you have not tried it, especially with Codex, it is a 100 out of 10.

[00:26:34]Everything is computer, and I really think that this is going to change how we interface with our digital lives. And again, my goal for most of AI is I can be not on my computer and stuff can still get done.

[00:26:47]So, I can enjoy my Hawaii vacation. This has been a very fun mini episode on browser use and computer use. If this is something you find interesting, let me know in the comments. I would love to hear how you use computer browser use, what questions you have about privacy, what questions you have about security, and other things I can show you about how I AI. Thanks for joining this week and I'll see you all soon.

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