Daily workflow

By the time you reach this chapter you have, in your hands, every move Codex makes. You’ve set the approval and sandbox dials, written the rules that keep the money bug from coming back, dialled effort up and down, pushed noisy work into subagents, packaged the per-bank CSV import as a skill, reached an external API over MCP, gated the dangerous edits with hooks, and let the whole thing run headless once a month with nobody watching. The primitives are all learned. Nothing below is new.

What’s left is the gap between knowing a move and reaching for it without thinking. That gap is real, and it’s where most of the day-to-day friction of working with an agent actually lives. You know you should be in a read-only posture while you explore, but re-typing the flags is a chore, so you don’t, and one day the agent edits something it shouldn’t. You know how to write a clean prompt, but under time pressure you fire off a vague one and lose ten minutes to a run that went somewhere you didn’t want. The primitives were the hard part to learn; making them automatic is the hard part to keep.

This chapter is about closing that last gap — turning the deliberate moves of the week into reflexes you don’t have to summon.

• Make profiles a daily habit — a budget-readonly profile for exploring and a budget-build profile for working, and the muscle of switching between them the moment the task changes shape.
• Prompt this kind of work effectively and smooth the editing friction — why agentic prompts pay for vagueness differently than chat does, the small input ergonomics that add up, and the fast tier for quick turns.
• Close the course — look back at the whole week on budgetcli, find the spec-level reference that complements it, and point at where to go next.

By the end, none of these will feel like steps. That’s the whole goal of a workflow chapter: to make the deliberate automatic. Start with profiles as a daily habit.