u/MMslider

Hi everyone!

I’m working on a few projects at my job, and I’d like to get some advice on how I’m using Codex and ChatGPT in general.

Right now, I’m using Codex and ChatGPT to develop a project at work, specifically for software development. I have a few questions and would like to get some advice, maybe even some guidance on what path to follow, so I can better understand what I should be doing, what I should keep doing, what I might want to stop doing, and so on.

I want to make better use of these tools, understand how they can make my work easier, and achieve better and more professional results. I would consider myself somewhere between a beginner and intermediate user when it comes to Codex. At the moment, I’m using Codex Desktop.

I started the project by talking directly with ChatGPT, explaining my ideas and what I needed to build. We refined the idea together and created an overall architecture and plan for how to execute the project.

The workflow I started using is roughly this:

I have ChatGPT analyze the project on GitHub. It also updates the documentation. In addition, it analyzes the project on GitHub, reviews what we have discussed inside the project folder in ChatGPT — and this part is important because it is one of the things I’m a little unsure about — and finally, I ask it to generate a prompt for me to use with Codex.

It does all of that and generates a huge prompt, which I then send to Codex to execute. Codex carries out the task, I take the result and send it back to ChatGPT, and then ChatGPT gives me some “smoke tests,” as it usually calls them, so I can test what was implemented.

That is basically what I have been doing.

The problem is that I simply don’t know whether this is the best way to work, or at least whether it is a good way to work. I would really appreciate some advice and criticism regarding the process I’m currently using.

I also don’t know whether there are any skills that I absolutely should be using, or whether there are plugins, tools, or other ways of using Codex and ChatGPT that I should know about.

Right now, I mainly work this way to save tokens and try to make my requests more precise. I talk a lot with ChatGPT, it helps me understand and refine the idea, and then I ask it to structure the prompt in the best possible way before I send it to Codex.

Even so, I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of the potential of these tools simply because I don’t know them well enough.

There is an overwhelming amount of content on YouTube, and I don’t even know where to start. Every week, something new appears claiming that it will “revolutionize” the way people use Codex.

I’m completely open to criticism regarding everything I’ve described. I’d like to learn about alternative workflows that could help me get more value from these tools and work in a more professional way. It could be something similar to what I’m already doing or something completely different. I just want to understand things better and have some kind of roadmap to follow.

I’d like to understand:

- How do you organize context for projects that last for months?

- Where do you record important decisions so that agents don’t forget them?

- Does using something like Obsidian make sense, or is there a better solution?

- Do you use files such as "AGENTS.md", documentation inside the repository itself, or some other structure? (At the moment, I ask ChatGPT to create an "AGENTS.md" file.)

- How do you divide the work between ChatGPT and Codex?

- Does my workflow of discussing things in ChatGPT → generating a prompt → executing it in Codex → reviewing the result in ChatGPT make sense?

- Are there any skills, MCPs, plugins, or tools that you consider essential?

- What would you do differently in my process?

Another issue I really need help with is context and memory.

ChatGPT helps me, explains a lot of things, and based on those discussions, we make decisions. For example, before I even started programming this project, I spent several days talking with ChatGPT and trying to better understand the project itself before actually writing any code.

The problem is that some of the decisions we made are simply being forgotten as the project progresses. I feel like it is gradually losing the project context.

I’d like to better understand how to provide context and how to make sure it can consistently remember the decisions we have already made.

I’ve heard quite a lot about using Obsidian, building a “second brain,” harnesses, and other things like that. But what I really want to understand is what I should actually do in practice, where I should learn more about this, and how I could build my own system to avoid situations where we make a decision and, by the end of the project, the AI simply no longer remembers it.

And I don’t even consider this project large enough for the AI to be forgetting certain details. In fact, just today I had to remind it about something we had already discussed before, and only after I reminded it were we able to continue thinking about the implementation.

I’ve also heard that ChatGPT has a limited amount of memory/context, equivalent to a few hundred pages or perhaps even less, when it comes to keeping track of information.

I’d like to understand how to mitigate this problem. How can I actually build this “second brain” and have some confidence that the AI will not forget something I asked for or a decision we made, even if it happened months ago?

I’m on the cheapest paid plan, the $20/month plan, and I also don’t know what limitations it has regarding these issues compared with the other plans.

Well, I think those are the main things I can remember right now.

I really need this kind of help and advice so I can understand how to improve my software development process and make better use of AI so that we can actually produce professional-quality work.

This message was translated into English by an AI. So if any part of the translation doesn’t make sense, please let me know and I’ll check it and explain more clearly what I meant.

I’m also having some problems with the frontend and with UX/UI. Codex built that part in a way that I didn’t really like, so I’m redesigning it using Figma Make, and I plan to integrate this new frontend into the existing project later.

If anyone has any advice on how to handle that integration without causing too much rework or creating unnecessary problems, I’m all ears. But that isn’t the main focus of this post — it’s just an additional question.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!