Using Codex as my OS

[Anand S]

Increasingly, I'm using Codex (or other AI coding agents) as the "operating system" to run programs. That is, rather than directly run programs, I have the coding agent run the program.

Advantage: If the program breaks, or needs a configuration change, the coding agent debugs it and fixes it. I don't need to do anything.

This is particularly useful for installation. For example:

Install demucs and run it against my music folder.

It's also useful for brittle scripts. When my WhatsApp scraper broke, I told Codex:

The scraper was working fine but today, it fails. Find out what changed in the WhatsApp Web UI and fix it.

Codex researched and replied:

The current scraper still finds the chat area and message rows, but its row-identity parser is now invalid. On March 28 the code assumed each message node had a packed data-id like:

true_<chat-id>@..._<message-id>
false_<chat-id>@..._<message-id>

Today, in the live WhatsApp tab, the visible message nodes still exist under #main [role="row"], but data-id now looks like a bare message ID:

3A4689CE2A81856D4BB0
ACED689BB5C3115D3DD361F3520F9ECE
...

Because parseDataId() only accepts the old packed format, it rejects every row, so whatsappMessages() returns [], and the bookmarklet shows Copy 0 messages.

WhatsApp appears to have split what used to be one overloaded field into separate concerns:

• data-id now behaves like messageId
• outgoing direction is likely encoded by DOM class (.message-out)
• chat/thread id is no longer bundled into the row data-id

... and went on to share a "Recommended hardening plan for future breakages".

If coding agents can install, configure, write, run, test, and debug programs, "Agentic Operating Systems" are not nearby. We already have them.