Depends how much you are using it - for a casual user the $20 tier gives you just about enough use for hobby projects etc.

Or if you are doing full time development then you just need to pony up for the 20x tier if you want to use it.

Running Codex locally removes so much friction and is so fast compared to either running it on the web (where it has to build environments online etc which consumes time) or compared to copy-pasting chatgpt that it's just a no-brainer.

I don't know about Chatgpt but I used Kimi (they have a Chinese-only plugin that does desktop control - works fine if you enable it even if you don't know Chinese). Observing how it works, it's mostly using the accessibility features of the user interfaces - it fetches a sort of DOM for the desktop applications. Only rarely it has to take a screenshot.

Literally everything from generic coding agent to shopping.

I run it in a MacOS vm, fwiw, for certain tasks. I usually hand it a repo and say “install all build dependencies” and it’ll click through installation GUIs where necessary. I wonder if the TOS of an application is enforceable if a bot agreed and a human never saw it.

It can UI test web apps if that’s part of your job, but it can also just use the browser for tasks. I’ve had it research flights by checking different dates automatically and compiling the results for me. I’ve heard others use it to handle building a shopping cart for instacart/grocery delivery.

Probably the hero usecase for most people would be app/web development. It can control either a browser or a device simulator and can iteratively build and test the application, by clicking real buttons.

I upgraded my workflow a few months ago from "copy-paste things in and out of ChatGPT" to "use an agent that edits my project files and runs tests on its own" and the ergonomics are just so much better and enables automating bigger tasks. I still monitor everything it does and do manual adjustments so I feel ownership of the code.