The orchestrator has been running for a while. Most of the flow auto-completes now, but one class of tasks never went away — the kind that needs me to drive a browser or a GUI App by hand. Register an account, grab a cookie, fill a canvas form, screenshot a logged-in state. I put those into a separate user-ask queue. CC sees a GUI-class task and drops it in there for me.

The problem is only I can consume user-ask. When I sleep, the queue piles up. The whole loop stalls until I wake.

This week I wired OpenAI’s Codex Mac App Computer Use into CC’s dispatch chain. When CC sees a user-ask that’s GUI-class, it pushes the task straight to Codex App via the codex:// URL scheme and hands over the screen. 90%+ of the queue items got eaten by Codex.

The wiring is simple. Codex App registers a deeplink. One shell line pushes a task across:

open "codex://new?path=$(pwd)&prompt=<url-encoded prompt>"

CC dispatch splits by task type — GUI ops go through codex://, pure CLI tasks still go to the original worker pane. Codex App spins up Computer Use on its own, runs everything inside its sandbox — can’t touch Terminal, can’t touch Codex itself, can’t escalate to admin. The safety boundary holds at the App level by default.

Red lines hard-coded in the prompt. Computer Use is a GUI agent — it sees an input box, it fills it. It can’t tell a real payment page from a fake one. So payments / credit cards / Apple Pay / 2FA / banking Apps are all banned. Hit a payment wall, kill the thread, bounce back to user-ask for me. Captcha same — Codex refuses reCAPTCHA Enterprise and Turnstile on its own and stops. These bounce back to me. Everything else it runs.

Not every GUI task should go through Computer Use. Rule of thumb: if the site has stable DOM, use Playwright. 100x cheaper, no drift. Canvas / Flutter / desktop Apps / shaky UI — that’s where Computer Use earns its keep. Codex starts losing precision past 20 steps. Long tasks get chopped short. Cross-App drags (Figma → Keynote) work but aren’t reliable.

Progress capture takes some thought. Computer Use’s execution shows up only inside Codex App’s GUI — screenshots, action log, live cursor — it doesn’t tee to file. Two ways for CC to get results back: have the Codex task write to a specified path on completion, or run codex app-server and listen for events over JSON-RPC. Day-to-day, the first one’s enough. Save the second for complex orchestration.

After wiring it in: CC no longer blocks on GUI tasks. The dispatch chain runs end-to-end. My consumption rate on user-ask was never going to catch CC’s production rate — now Codex handles the bulk and I only review what Codex can’t — payments, logins, Captcha — which were always going to be on me anyway.

Every new GUI proxy plugged in shrinks my manual surface by another notch.

Everything except payments is automated now.