Learn AI Coding | How To Use OpenAI Codex in VS Code for FREE! | Latest GPT‑5 Version

In this video, I'll show you how to use OpenAI Codex - the latest version, GPT-5.3-Codex - in Visual Studio Code. OpenAI is currently offering FREE access to Codex when you log in via ChatGPT, so it's the perfect time to give it a try.

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Codex site: https://openai.com/codex/
VS Code site: https://code.visualstudio.com/
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Well, you may have seen this essay which went viral on X recently. It’s called “Something Big Is Happening” and it’s written by Matt Shumer, the founder of an AI writing startup.

In his article, Shumer says that the disruption that AI will cause to the job market is comparable to the chaos that unfolded in 2020.

He claims that a new generation of AI agents, like GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, means that he is no longer needed for the programming part of his job. He said “I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing”.

Then, he goes so far as to claim that Codex has human-like judgement and taste.

Well, of course I wanted to test this magical AI agent for myself, and luckily, it’s available to try out for free with a ChatGPT account. So I’ll show you how to get started.

Firstly, make sure you install Visual Studio Code. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux, and the link is in the description.

Next, visit openai.com/codex and click Try in your IDE. In the dropdown, select VS Code. Then, on the dialog that appears, click Open.

Now, it will take you to the extension marketplace and open the page for the Codex extension. Click the Install button and it will download.

After it’s finished installing, you’ll find a Codex button on the sidebar – click on it and you’ll see this splash screen. Click on the button to Sign in with ChatGPT, and it will open your browser where you can log into your account.

OK, so here we are in Codex. I’ve created a new folder on my machine, called React Wordpad, and instead of doing the usual test of asking it to make a Space Invaders clone or something, I’m going to ask it to make a Wordpad clone. You know, the old Wordpad app from Windows 7.

So, what is my verdict? Well, Codex is definitely a super useful tool for generating usable proof of concepts or POCs in a short amount of time, and AI assisted coding has improved by leaps and bounds over the past few years. But can it really replace programmers? With this current generation of the tool, I’d say no.

You still need a lot of technical knowledge to use these AI tools correctly. Just in this small project, I had to know how to run commands in the terminal, check the Chrome devtools, interpret the error messages shown, and I also had to do a lot of manual testing because certain features of the initial version were simply broken. And as far as Codex having human-like judgement, well, I had to have the judgement of a human programmer to tell it that it shouldn’t put all of the components in one file!

I can see this having an impact on younger programmers who used to do a lot of the grunt work, but I still think that organisations are making a huge mistake if they lay off engineers en masse to replace them with Codex and similar AI agents. At the very least, they’ll end up with a lot of spaghetti code and nobody to fix it!

Видео Learn AI Coding | How To Use OpenAI Codex in VS Code for FREE! | Latest GPT‑5 Version канала HandyAndy Tech Tips