The argument in one line.
AI agents like Codex become dramatically more useful when paired with a peripheral stack of Mac tools that accelerate input speed, provide visual context, and integrate your personal knowledge base.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A developer actively using Codex or Claude Code who wants a curated set of Mac tools to feed better context and speed up the prompting workflow.
- A builder who wants to go beyond just AI chat and wire together a full AI workstation — voice input, visual annotation, clipboard management, and a second brain.
- Someone who has never thought about building a custom Electron desktop app for a niche personal problem and wants a concrete one-prompt proof of concept to try.
- A technical content creator or indie developer interested in combining Readwise, Excalidraw, and AI agents into a connected research and design flow.
SKIP IF…
- You are on Windows or Linux — most tools shown (WhisperFlow, CleanShot X, Raycast) are Mac-only or Mac-primary, and alternatives are not covered.
- You are not using Codex specifically; the MCP integrations, skills system, and plugin setup are Codex-specific and do not map directly to Claude Code or Cursor.
The full version, fast.
An AI coding agent is only as strong as the workstation feeding it context, so pairing Codex with a tight stack of peripheral Mac apps multiplies what one agent can do. The mechanism is a context-and-input pipeline: dictate prompts with Wispr Flow, recall copied text and images through Raycast's clipboard history, annotate screenshots in CleanShot X, sketch UI options through Paper's MCP, query your reading second-brain via Readwise, generate diagrams and decks with an Excalidraw skill, and spin up single-prompt Electron utilities for any gap that remains. Treat every recurring friction point as a tool to build rather than buy, ship narrow apps that solve your own workflow, and the agent stops feeling like a chatbot and starts behaving like staff.
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00:00 – 01:18
01 · Cold open + Codex framing
Hook on the missing peripheral stack, then a 60-second primer on Codex as a Claude-Code/Cowork hybrid that can vibe-code, multitask threads, and produce documents.
01:18 – 04:01
02 · Tool 1 - Wispr Flow
Single-keypress voice-to-text on the Mac. Demos firing three parallel Codex agent tasks (notes app, marketing research, Neon Postgres) by voicing prompts. Pricing: free tier + paid above weekly word cap.
04:01 – 06:48
03 · Tool 2 - Raycast
Clipboard manager + launcher. Demos copying multiple tweets/images and pasting them into a Codex slide-deck prompt via cmd+m. Month-long clipboard history is the unlock. Free for everything shown.
06:48 – 10:07
04 · Tool 3 - CleanShot X
Pinned screenshots + arrow/text markup for giving Codex unambiguous visual instructions. Bonus: cmd+shift+5 video recording drag-straight-into-Twitter workflow. $30 one-time for local.
10:07 – 14:36
05 · Tool 4 - Paper
AI-native Figma-alternative with an MCP plug-in for Codex. Demos voice-prompting Codex to generate three design directions live inside Paper canvas pinned to the right of the screen. $16/mo annual.
14:36 – 17:06
06 · Tool 5 - Readwise Reader
Bookmark-driven second brain with Chrome extension + MCP. Auto-syncs X bookmarks. Runs a Readwise MCP prompt in Codex that clusters 144 saved items into a topic map and exports to Word/Excel. $9.99/mo.
17:06 – 20:03
07 · Tool 6 - Excalidraw + custom Codex skill
Diagramming tool driven by his custom Excalidraw Codex skill - Codex researches a topic and emits a full 12-slide visual presentation. Free for everything shown; $6/mo annual for paid sync.
20:03 – 23:14
08 · Tool 7 - Build Your Own
Mindset segment. Pitch: when a tool you want does not exist, prompt Codex to build a single-purpose Electron app for ~$3 of tokens. Demos his Leave a Comment annotation app for Google Docs.
23:14 – 24:35
09 · Summary + CTA
30-second rapid recap of all seven tools, then like/subscribe close with the I-make-multiple-videos-a-week frequency promise.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- AI agents are only as good as what you feed them — the peripheral input stack matters as much as the model itself.
- Wispr Flow lets you prompt AI agents by speaking rather than typing, which is significantly faster when firing off multiple parallel tasks.
- Raycast's clipboard manager (free tier) stores a month of copy history and lets you paste images, links, and text into AI agents with a single keyboard shortcut.
- CleanShot X keeps screenshots persistently on screen so you can annotate, crop, and pass visual context to an agent without the screenshot disappearing.
- Paper is a second-brain reading tool that stores and surfaces saved articles inside a personal knowledge base that can be queried as agent context.
- Readwise syncs highlights from Kindle, web articles, and PDFs into a searchable database that feeds richer context into research-oriented agent prompts.
- Excalidraw lets you sketch a rough wireframe and pass the image to an AI agent as a visual specification — faster than describing layout in text.
- Building a one-prompt Electron app for a specific workflow creates a custom tool that integrates directly with your AI agent stack without a SaaS subscription.
- Voice-to-text prompting removes the typing bottleneck when running multiple parallel agent sessions — speaking is 3-4x faster than typing for most people.
- A clipboard manager that saves images enables visual context injection into AI agents — you can copy a UI screenshot and paste it directly into a prompt.
- The input layer is where most AI agent users lose time — optimizing for fast context delivery compounds across hundreds of daily agent interactions.
- Using GPT 5.5 high for complex agent tasks and switching down to a cheaper tier for simpler ones mirrors the Sonnet-planning plus Haiku-execution split used in Claude Code.
Steal the format.
Riley Brown agent-stack playbook
Pre-declare the axes that your tools fight on, then list one tool per axis, then close with a mindset twist that reframes the whole list.
- Open with a single-sentence thesis that names the bottleneck (here: input/context/speed). Every item in the list must visibly solve one of those bottlenecks.
- Pin a talking-head insert in the corner of every screen-capture demo - parasocial retention is free and most stack-listicles still skip it.
- Show the actual prompt you would type/voice into the agent, not just the tool UI. Real prompts are what makes the demo feel usable.
- End each segment with the price in plain dollars. It is the easiest way to make a stack feel real and trustworthy.
- Close with a mindset twist - Tool 7 should not be a tool but a worldview. That reframes the recap from shopping-list to way-of-working.
- Recap all items in 30 seconds before the like/subscribe ask - gives the algorithm completion data plus rewards skim-watchers.
- For a JoeFlow version: rebrand this as 7 Tools That Make Claude Code 10x More Powerful with JoeFlow as Tool 1 in slot one. Same skeleton, your worldview at the close.
Terms worth knowing.
- Codex
- An AI agent tool that can generate files (code, documents, spreadsheets, presentations) and handle multiple simultaneous tasks in separate chat threads.
- AI agent
- A software system that can autonomously take sequences of actions — browsing the web, writing code, creating files — in response to a natural-language instruction.
- Vibe coding
- A workflow where a developer describes what they want in plain language and lets an AI agent generate the code, with minimal manual writing.
- Whisper Flow
- A voice-to-text desktop app that transcribes spoken words and inserts the resulting text wherever the cursor is active, enabling hands-free prompting.
- Raycast
- A macOS productivity launcher that replaces Spotlight and adds features like persistent clipboard history, quick calculations, and app shortcuts.
- Clipboard manager
- A tool that stores a history of everything copied to the clipboard, allowing users to retrieve and paste items copied minutes, hours, or weeks ago.
- CleanShot X
- A macOS screenshot and screen-recording app that keeps captures pinned on screen for annotation (arrows, text) before they are saved or shared.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- An open protocol that connects AI agents to external tools and data sources, allowing the agent to read, write, or interact with third-party apps directly.
- Paper (design tool)
- A Figma-like visual design canvas built specifically for AI agents, where an agent can create and edit UI designs in real time via an MCP connection.
- Readwise Reader
- A read-later and bookmarking app that aggregates saved articles, tweets, and newsletters into a single searchable library — often called a 'second brain.'
- Second brain
- A personal digital knowledge base that captures notes, bookmarks, and research so information can be retrieved and reused later without relying on memory.
- Excalidraw
- An open-source browser-based whiteboard tool for creating hand-drawn-style diagrams, flowcharts, and slide decks with minimal friction.
- Electron app
- A desktop application built with web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) using the Electron framework, allowing one codebase to run on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- Firebase Storage
- Google's cloud object-storage service, commonly used to store and serve user-uploaded files (images, videos) in web and desktop applications.
- Spotlight (macOS)
- The built-in macOS search and launcher, accessed via Command+Space, used to open apps, find files, and perform quick calculations.
Things they pointed at.
18:18channelCain Calloway (YouTube creator analyzed in Excalidraw demo)
00:47toolCodex (OpenAI)
00:47toolClaude Code
21:20toolFirebase Storage (backend for Leave a Comment app)
Lines you could clip.
00:08
“These AI agents are powerful, but they are only as good as what you feed them. The input matters. The context matters.”
22:00
“Whenever there is a tool that you wish existed, you should try and build a desktop app that does the exact thing that you want.”
22:54
“This app cost me like maybe, I do not know, $3 of tokens and it is an app that I can use that has full storage that I actively use in my workflow.”
23:48
“The more you get in the habit of just building tools that solve your own problems, you are more likely to stumble on something that other people would want as well.”
10:12
“There will be a lot more tools coming around that are made specifically for your AI agents.”
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
metaphorstory
00:00Tools like Codex and Code are taking over the world, but no one's talking about the tools that you use alongside Codex and Claude Code.
00:08Because here's the thing, these AI agents are powerful, but they're . The input matters. The context matters.
00:16How fast you move between your AI agent and the rest of your computer matters. So here are seven tools that I've downloaded on my Mac that I use to make AI agents 10 times better.
00:28So before we dive into tool number one, I wanted to talk about Codecs. So Codecs is the tool that I've been using for the past month or two. It is an AI agent tool that can create any type of file on my computer, and you can think of Codecs as a combination of Claude Code and Claude Cowork.
00:47In Codex, you can vibe code any project, and it will actually open up on the right side of the screen. You can also create any type of document. So you can ask Codex to create an Excel sheet, a document, or a PowerPoint presentation.
01:03And what I like about this tool is it allows me to multitask by switching the chat thread, and I can work on many things at the same time.
01:12And as I'm multitasking, this requires a lot of typing, which brings me to my first tool.
01:18The first tool that I use with my AI agents is WhisperFlow. WhisperFlow is a voice to text model that lives on your keyboard. Right?
01:28I can press one single button on my keyboard and I can speak and that will immediately be turned to text. And so I'm constantly prompting. I'm sending things like, please can you make a notes app with a full database, and I want you to make it look like Notion.
01:45Now, I can switch agents. I want you to tell me, uh, any marketing opportunities for note taking tools.
01:53I want you to search the internet, find market opportunities. Where could I find a marketing strategy? What can I do to grow my note taking app?
02:02Alright. I can just fire off these agents just by speaking into my computer. Neon Postgres integration, please tell me about that.
02:12What am I able to do with Neon? This is one of my first times vibe coding, so can you please explain to me how that works? And as you can see here, you can fire off tasks to agents.
02:22And each of these tasks, because we're using GPT 5.5 high or extra high, I switch between these two. These agents can take a while, so you should be multitasking. I find speaking into my computer is significantly faster.
02:35And so if you go to whisperflow.ai and you download it for your Mac, they also have a Windows app if you have Windows, you can download it and their free print plan is pretty generous, But it is a paid plan after you say enough words throughout the week.
02:51And again, none of these are sponsored, so I'm sure there's cheaper alternatives out there. And if you don't wanna hold down the f n key, you can actually double tap it.
03:00And what it will do is I can actually go fully hands free and record my voice. And remember, you don't need to like stay on this page while you're using it. I could completely switch apps.
03:10I could go click around and I might wanna think like Whisper, Flow, Docs.
03:15I might wanna like go to different pages, do some research on it and and I might wanna go to different websites and then I can go back to Codex and then if I go back to Codex here and then I just press the f n key again, that text will be inserted directly in Codex.
03:33Another thing to note, let's say I'm recording my voice right now, I'm recording, I'm recording, I click on something and then I accidentally press it like that. Right?
03:43I didn't have my cursor in here and it wasn't entered in the text box. All I need to do is go to Whisper Flow and I can see all of my recent ones.
03:53So I can just very easily copy this and paste it in. Now I wanna move on to tool number two that I use with AI agents. Tool number two is arguably my favorite and that is Raycast.
04:05Raycast is a desktop app that lives on my computer and this app, it has a lot of different uses to a lot of different people. For me, I primarily use it as a clipboard manager. It saves everything I copy to my clipboard.
04:19So let's say I'm doing research on Codex and I find this tweet, I can just copy all of these different links. We can go back to codex and what I can do is if I hit command m, it opens up the Raycast clipboard and I can paste all of these in.
04:36And so I can see all of these different tweets and you'll notice here that they even have like a little graphic that shows which tweet it is and I have it set to save my clipboard history for the last month. So that means if I go command m and then I type x.com, we have all of the links that I've copied to my clipboard.
04:57But it also works with images as well. Let's say I'm making a presentation and we're making a slide deck directly inside Codex, I can very easily, if I find an image I like, I can just copy the image, I can just copy the image, I can just copy the image.
05:13And if we go back to Codecs and I were here, like, let's say we're making a slide deck, I can hit command n on Codecs to make a new chat. Please make a slide deck and include these images.
05:25This should be a complete guide to Claude code. And if you hit command m to open up your clipboard history, I can actually filter them by images. So these are all of the images that I've saved to my computer over the past month, and I can actually scroll down and see all of the images that I've saved.
05:42First, open up Raycast, it will look a lot like this. You won't actually have these shortcuts set up for command m for your clipboard history. And so what you'll need to do is you'll just need to type in clipboard history.
05:54You want to right click it or double click it with on the trackpad on a Mac. And then you can actually scroll down and you can go to configure command. And so then, this will open up all of the commands here.
06:07One other thing when you open this, not only can I type in any app on my computer and it's significantly faster than the one built into Apple, which is the Spotlight app? You can actually just use this as a calculator, which is one little thing. Like, can go 1,000 times 1,000, and it'll show you.
06:22It has like this like live calculator that's built into this. So this here is Raycast.
06:29Every single thing that I showed you is a 100% free. They have a pro plan, but that's to access their AI features and their cloud features, none of which I use.
06:38And so I've been using Raycast for three years now, and I use it so often, and I've never paid them a dime. I honestly feel like I owe them money because this tool is so good and I just use their free plan. So the third tool that I use with AI agents is the most visual.
06:52It is CleanShot X. So if you've used a Mac, you know that command shift four is a screenshot.
06:59Well, when you download CleanShot X, it acts a little bit differently. So this is a website that we've created. If we hit command shift four, I can take a screenshot and instead of it showing up on the bottom right and going away, it shows up here on the left and it just stays there.
07:14So I can actually create a bunch of different screenshots and they can end up they just stack here on the left. What makes this so important is oftentimes when you're making a website and you might actually be making a document and we wanna make changes to a specific part, I can screenshot it. I can open this up like this in CleanShot X and I can use these arrows to point at specific things.
07:40I can even use text and say like dots should be bigger. Right?
07:45And so I can give context really quickly to the AI agents and then I can just copy this and then I can paste it in. And all of these stay pinned until I hit copy or save. Let's say I wanted to make a change to the sidebar, I could just say, like, I could use this arrow and just say, like, I don't like this.
08:04You know, it's just really easy to give a lot of context really quickly. I could just include this image right here, make better banner options, and then I could say, I don't like this whole thing.
08:17So I can use a shape, and could say this kinda just looks weird. And then I could say, for the third image that I uploaded, this kind of looks weird. I want that whole, like, thing that I put in a rectangle, just kind of change that.
08:28I don't like the horizontal lines there. And so much about AI agents is giving good context to the agents.
08:35There's nothing better than visuals. I'll go over cost in just a second. I do wanna talk about the fact that if you hit command shift five, you can actually take a video, and it is really good video screen share software.
08:47And so I can very easily just record my screen, and you can either record a GIF or a video, and I can just record a video. Please do research on CleanShot X.
08:57Tell me everything there is to know about it. I love it so much. And so we're just taking a video here.
09:02You can easily pause it. So right now, you know, when I do some demos on X, I'll often pause it while it's loading or thinking, and then I can play it once it gets to, like, the action. And these are really easy to just take some videos to post on Twitter.
09:16Once you're done filming your video, just like the photos, you'll see you'll have a fifteen second video here on the left side and then I can very easily just navigate and remember to navigate we'll use Raycast. We can open up Comet and we can go to Twitter And since we have this video, we can just drag this video directly into the tweet.
09:35Oh my god. This is absolutely insane. One of my favorite features for any app.
09:40Right? We're starting to use these workflows together, and there you go.
09:43We took a screen recording, uploaded it, used WhisperFlow to write out my tweet. And so CleanShot X, which you can find on cleanshot.com, is a $30 one time fee.
09:56If you want their cloud, they have a recurring service. I actually don't do that. I just pay for their local storage version, which saves everything locally to your computer.
10:06I don't use their cloud. For tool number four that I use with AI agents, it's one of the coolest, and it is the one that makes feel the most futuristic and that is Paper.
10:17So I can type in Paper and Paper looks a lot like Figma except it's built specifically for AI agents. On Codex, when you set up Paper, you can actually set up the Paper MCP.
10:29So imagine we're building this Notes app, and I can hit command n to open up a new chat. And when you create a new chat within a new project, it sees everything that's in this project. So that Notes app, it has that context.
10:41So I can say, hey, so you know the Notes app that we're working on that looks like Notion? I actually wanna come up with some other design ideas. Can you please create three different options for the the main notes page?
10:54And then I can do slash paper m c p, and what it will do is I can just press enter, and it actually connects to paper that's open on my computer, and it will design directly on paper.
11:08And by the way, if I wanna use codecs with another app, what I do is I'll come here, I will open this up in a mini window, drag it to the side, pin it to the side like this. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna open up Paper on the right side of this, and you'll notice here the agent is already working.
11:26I'm not doing anything. Right now, all I did was say use the paper MCP and it's creating real designs in real time.
11:35So here I can see the thinking, I can see that it's working on this design here, I'm not doing anything. And take a look at this. It's creating these designs and I love this animation.
11:46Like, it looks so cool. You can zoom all the way in, you can click on it. If I double click on this, I can literally change the text directly and I can actually just make edits similar to Figma.
11:58You don't have full control like Figma because it's still like code based. So like if I try to drag something down, it may be in relation to it, like they kind of like you can like drag things down.
12:11It's a little bit different than Figma, but I think it's really fun to use. I can hit back space and we can just see the AI building our designs in real time. You can see here it's making another design.
12:22This is a little bit different. And there we go. We have three design directions.
12:27I can come back here. Hey, I really like design number one. Can we please make three variations that are more like design number one?
12:35Try different color styles, different font styles, use your best judgment. And if you ever wanna reference a specific component, like if I were to wanted to like change this, I can select this and you can just copy this link and I can paste it in and be like, hey, and also like this part, I don't like it.
12:52And so then I can just paste in this link which references that component and I can just press enter. And the agent will then start making some more variations on this design, and it has reference to that specific component.
13:06And so Paper has a paid subscription, which I'll get to in just a second, and part of that is you get image generation. And with image generation, I'm using I can use OpenAI Image two and I could say, like, let's say we wanted to add images on a landing page, I could put like beautiful waterfall background and we can generate images directly in here.
13:31Let's say we wanted it four by three, you can generate an image and it will actually generate directly on the frame. It's making the changes that we wanted. All of these are gonna be similar to this one right here.
13:42But our image is done generating. And so what you can do is you can very easily select any image and we could say, like, make this glossier, make it colder, so some frost on image.
13:58So we can run that and it will create a variation of that image. So that's a fun thing that you can do. Here we see that it's making even more variations of this in slightly different colors.
14:08It's made to be used with your AI agents. And I've been talking about this a lot. There will be a lot more tools coming around that are made specifically for your AI agents.
14:17Okay. So the cost for this tool is $16 a month if you pay annually, $20 a month if you pay monthly.
14:24I will say there is a free plan. You basically get like a limited amount of tool calls. So there is a usage cap and then you have to pay either annually or monthly and that's the cost of using paper.
14:36So the next tool is Readwise or the Readwise Reader. This is my tool and they have a Chrome extension. And all of my tweets automatically get saved here.
14:47So they have a setup where you can actually sync your bookmarks. So when you bookmark something on x, it automatically gets saved to your Readwise reader.
14:58And you can see here I have a lot of tweets saved and anything that gets saved gets saved with the assets in a clean list that I can go back and look at. Anything that I find useful for content, I can just save.
15:11What they recently released is a MCP and they also released a plugin. So if you go to plugins on Codex, you can just type in Readwise and you can see here they have a Readwise integration.
15:24This allows you to create a new chat and I can say please summarize my last three days on at Readwise.
15:34Please group them by topic and put them in a slash, let's do a word doc.
15:43Please make it good. There you go.
15:46And so what this will do is this will search for our second brain tool. It'll search through all of the things that I've saved recently and it will give us a nice give me a nice summary.
15:56Okay. So I've bookmarked a lot of different things over the last three days. So a 144 items were saved during that window, and we can see this document.
16:05We have a topic map, so AI agents and control layers, Apple and ambient devices, markets, energy, infrastructure, geopolitics, institutions. It's kind of a cool, like, glimpse into what my interests are.
16:16These are the things that I bookmark and I can create this document. Normally, put it in an Excel sheet with a clickable link, which I could literally say, hey, can you actually put it in a sheet and make all the links clickable to the original source? Right?
16:28And now I can change it to an Excel sheet. The point is, I can take all of that data, which is my second brain, anything I bookmark, or anything that I manually save with their Chrome extension, it's a very easy way to interact with all of the things that you find interesting.
16:44Super useful. So Readwise is $9.99 per month.
16:49That's what I'm paying. I don't think it's too crazy. If anyone knows any alternatives for this that's cheaper, let me know in the comments.
16:56I'm willing to switch. I just love that I can save everything to one place and my AI agents can go through them. That's why I use this.
17:03For the sixth best tool that I use with AI, it is Excalidraw. And so Excalidraw is a visual diagramming software.
17:11And if you guys watch my videos, you know I love using Excalidraw. It makes it really easy to type whatever I want and make a visual diagram and they have really good keys.
17:23So I can press 2 to create this, I can press five to create these lines really easily. It is just the best diagramming workflow software.
17:33Well, it turns out that AI is actually really good at using Excalidraw. And if you go to Codex and you use the Excalidraw skill that I've created and remember in Codex you go slash and then you type out your skill and mine is the Excalidraw diagram skill.
17:49I'll put it in the link into the description for the Excalidraw diagram skill but you can say please do research on the latest advancements in language models, especially with DeepSeek and how it works.
18:08Please create a visual presentation on this.
18:14And this will take up to ten minutes because it's gonna do in-depth research before it creates the diagram. But I'll show you an example of one that I've created in the past. I used my YouTube researcher skill to analyze Cain Calloway, who's one of my friends who's actually a great YouTuber.
18:30I wanted to analyze all of his videos and then it created this presentation. And part of this Excalidraw skill is it can I'll show you. So it just returns this link and you can right click it and hit open in browser and then you can click replace my content and this is what the AI generated.
18:49A full presentation. I think it's 12 different slides explaining Cain Calloway's full YouTube flow because he makes content about how to create content, and that's what all of these slides are about.
19:03It talks about his dopamine ladder. It talks about psychology and rhythm and tone, and it creates these nice little presentations.
19:11Sometimes, you need to make some slight adjustments, but that's part of the fun, is it creates kind of a general outline that you can then edit.
19:19And so this allows me to create presentations really quickly. I usually just write down all my ideas really quickly. AI creates a shell, then I go through and edit them for whatever presentation that I'm trying to make.
19:31Everything that I showed you, I believe, can be done on the free plan. Like, you can create these boards and then open them. You just can't save multiple of them unless you do the paid plan, and the paid plan is $6 a month when you do annual.
19:44I think it's, like, $9.99 if you do it monthly. And you can find this on excalidraw.com. It is literally one of my favorite tools.
19:52I've been using it as a content creator for about two years now. And moving to the final and best tool that you can use with Codex is your own.
20:02On Codex, you can literally build your own tool and I'm gonna show you a tool that I made in a single prompt. I'm telling you, I want you to train your brain into thinking whenever there's a tool that you wish existed, you should try and build a desktop that does the exact thing that you want.
20:18And I made an extremely niche tool the other day in one prompt, this is an electron desktop app.
20:25And so I was on Google Docs. So if we go to docs.google.com, this is how I write my scripts when I'm doing a a more structured video.
20:34I usually write out the intro. And when I'm communicating with my editors about what to show on the screen, I want to be able to like add images or videos directly on here.
20:45I like to be able to comment and I want to be able to add videos to this comment. The unfortunate fact is is I actually can't do that on Google Docs. So I, in one prompt, created this skill where I can press command option l, it opens up this little little app here.
21:02And so let's say I wanted to add an image on a specific part, I can add any image or video. Right?
21:08And remember, we're using the same tools that we were using before. I'm I'm gonna record a little video here as an example and I'm gonna press stop. And so I can upload these videos to this app and say, please add these when I say this part.
21:25And so this little app that I keep on my desktop is called leave a comment. I can very easily copy this link and paste it here in the comments. So now when my editor comes here and looks at this, he'll see this link and this is what he'll see.
21:38A public link with those assets that he can very easily download. It's literally called leave a comment and it says Riley Brown left a comment and I can include any asset. It can be an SVG, PNG, or a video and they I can leave as many comments and videos and assets as I want, and I created this in a single prompt using Codecs, and I used Firebase Storage for the storage.
22:02And so in order to create your own desktop app, all you have to type in is please create an electron app that does blank. When you're done, please download it to my computer and I want to test it and use it. And you can literally create in one prompt an app that solves a very specific problem.
22:19One thing I didn't even show in this app, if you upload let's say I were to upload an image here, I can do a lot of what you can do with CleanShot Pro. You know how CleanShot Pro I can add stuff to this?
22:31If I paste it in here, I just tried to see in this one prompt how much of CleanShot Pro could I add to this app and I added a lot of what you can do in the CleanShot Pro in this app. You can even draw little arrows. The arrows are a little messed up, it's kinda weird, but a lot of what you can do in CleanShot Pro, you can add and this app costed me like maybe, I don't know, $3 of tokens and it's an app that I can use that has full storage that I actively use in my workflow.
23:00And this is just a little tool that allows me to leave a comment. It does no more than I need it to. It's not a full production app for other people.
23:07It does exactly what I want it to do. And that is the essence of this last category of tool, which is build your own. So in summary, AI agents are super useful.
23:17I love using tools like Codecs. And if you use Claude Code, that's great as well. But there are some tools that go along with these AI agents that make life so much easier, and we talked about Excalidraw, which allow you to create diagrams and AI agents, especially codecs with the plugin, can create Excalidraw diagrams.
23:36Readwise for a second brain, paper dot design is basically like an AI powered Figma, clean shot pro to basically very quickly be able to take high quality screenshots. Raycast is super cool because you have your clipboard history. You can categorize your clipboard history.
23:52Whisper flow so that you can very easily say things out loud, and then it shows up on your screen. And then finally, you have build your own.
24:02You can literally build your own tool using AI, and then you can use it every day. And I'm telling you right now, this is how you create a valuable business. The more you get in the habit of just building tools that solve your own problems, you're more likely to as well.
24:19So I highly recommend this. Plus, it's really rewarding and fun. Anyway, thank you guys so much for watching.
24:24If you enjoy videos like these, please hit that like button. Please hit subscribe. I make multiple videos like this every single week, so make sure to follow-up for that.
24:32I'll see you guys later. Peace.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Riley Brown spends 24 minutes making one argument: the bottleneck on AI agents is not the model, it is the friction between you and the model. Then he names the seven Mac apps he has docked around Codex to remove every gram of that friction.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:08concept
The four bottlenecks an agent stack has to solve
- Input speed (voice over typing)
- Context quality (visuals + history)
- Cross-app friction (clipboard + launcher)
- Tool-fit (custom one-prompt apps)
Riley's implicit organizing principle. Every tool in the list maps to one of these four jobs.
Steal forany tool-stack listicle - pre-declare the axes you are evaluating against so the list feels designed instead of random
00:16list
The 7-tool AI-agent peripheral stack
- Wispr Flow (voice to text)
- Raycast (clipboard + launcher)
- CleanShot X (visual context)
- Paper (AI-native design canvas)
- Readwise Reader (second brain)
- Excalidraw (AI-generated diagrams/decks)
- Build Your Own (one-prompt Electron apps)
The spine of the video - seven Mac apps Riley keeps docked around Codex.
Steal forcreator stack content - a curated 7-item list with named jobs and explicit prices is highly clippable and re-shareable
22:05concept
Build Your Own - one-prompt Electron app recipe
- Identify a tool you wish existed
- Prompt: please create an Electron app that does X
- Ask Codex to download it to your computer
- Iterate on it until it solves YOUR specific problem, not everyone's
Reframes the listicle from apps to a worldview: agent-first computing means treating tools as disposable, single-purpose, and personal.
Steal forcloser-segments on educational content - end with a mindset twist that recontextualizes the whole video
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
23:50subscribe
“If you enjoy videos like these, please hit that like button. Please hit subscribe. I make multiple videos like this every single week, so make sure to follow-up for that.”
Soft, low-pressure, paired with a frequency promise (multiple per week). Comes after a 30-second tool recap that quietly re-establishes the value of subscribing.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
