Codex just became hands-free

Welcome back to The Shift. Let’s get straight to what matters in AI today…

Today we have:

💻 OpenAI's Codex Can Now Work While Your Mac Is Locked

🎨How to Design and Hand Off to Developers With Penpot

🧮 OpenAI Says Its AI Just Solved an 80-Year-Old Math Problem

🔨Tools and Shifts you cannot miss

💻 OpenAI's Codex Can Now Work While Your Mac Is Locked

OpenAI pushed four new updates to Codex, and the through-line is clear: less babysitting, more doing. Codex is moving toward something that runs in the background and gets things done without you hovering.

The Shift:

Your Screen Is Now Part of the Conversation - Hit Command-Command and attach any open app window directly into a Codex thread. Text, visuals, content, all of it lands in context instantly.

Set a Goal and Walk Away - Goal Mode lets you give Codex a target and leave it running for hours or even days. Works across the app, IDE extension, and CLI.

Codex Works Even When Your Mac Is Off - Trigger Codex from your phone or another device, and it keeps working on your desktop apps, even with the screen dark and Mac locked.

Edit Web Pages by Just Describing What You Want - Advanced annotation lets you point at a web page, describe the change, and see a live preview. No digging through code to figure out what to touch.

These four updates together push Codex closer to a background agent than a coding assistant. The gap between giving instructions and getting finished work is getting much smaller.

Together with Viktor

700+ teams have Viktor reading their Google Ads every morning.

Your media team opens Slack at 8am. There's a cross-platform brief in #growth: Google Ads spend vs. ROAS, Meta CPA by campaign, Stripe revenue by channel. Viktor posted it at 6am. Nobody asked for it.

Last week, one team's Viktor caught a spend spike at 2am on a broad match campaign and flagged it in Slack: "CPA up 340%. Recommend pausing and shifting budget to the top two performers." That would have burned $3K by morning. The media buyer woke up to a problem already handled.

Your strategist reviews spend trends. Your account manager checks revenue attribution. Same Slack channel, same colleague, before anyone's first coffee.

Google Ads, Meta, Stripe. One message. No Looker, no Data Studio. Anomaly detection runs around the clock. Cross-platform reporting runs on autopilot.

5,700+ teams. SOC 2 certified. Your data never trains models.

"Viktor is now an integral team member, and after weeks of use we still feel we haven't uncovered the full potential." — Patrick O'Doherty, Director, Yarra Web

Start free. $100 in credits →

🎨How to Design and Hand Off to Developers With Penpot

The open source Figma alternative. Free forever, self-hostable, no vendor lock-in.

Step 1: Sign up or self-host - Create a free account at penpot.app or deploy on your own server with Docker. Your files, your infrastructure.

Step 2: Design your UI - Wireframe, design, and prototype for any device, flexible layouts, components, and design tokens all built in.

Step 3: Build a shared design system - Create reusable components and tokens that sync across your team. One source of truth, no file drift.

Step 4: Hand off without the back and forth - Click any element and get 1:1 CSS, HTML, SVG, and JSON output automatically. Developers get exact specs, no translation needed.

Step 5: Connect AI agents via MCP - Penpot's MCP server lets Claude, Cursor, or any LLM read and write to your designs directly. You can try Penpot free here.

🧮 OpenAI Says Its AI Just Solved an 80-Year-Old Math Problem

OpenAI's new reasoning model has disproved a geometry conjecture posed by Paul Erdős in 1946, one that mathematicians had been unable to crack for nearly eight decades. This time, the math community is backing the claim.

The Shift:

OpenAI Got This Wrong Once Before - Seven months ago, OpenAI claimed GPT-5 solved 10 Erdős problems. It hadn't. The solutions already existed in published literature, drew public ridicule from rivals, and the post was quietly deleted.

This Time Mathematicians Are Validating It - Noga Alon, Melanie Wood, and Thomas Bloom published companion remarks supporting the disproof. Bloom, who runs the Erdős Problems website, previously called OpenAI's earlier claim a dramatic misrepresentation.

The Model Found Something Entirely New - For 80 years, square grids were considered the best possible solution. The model discovered a new family of geometric constructions that perform better, something no mathematician had previously identified.

A General-Purpose Model, Not a Math-Specific One - The proof came from a reasoning model not designed for math. OpenAI says this shows AI can now hold long chains of reasoning and connect ideas across fields, with potential implications in biology, physics, and medicine.

This is being framed as the first time AI has autonomously solved a prominent open math problem. If the validation holds, it marks a genuine shift in what reasoning models are capable of producing independently.

Together with Hightouch

Winning, on-brand ads—without endless prompting

Most AI ad tools generate volume, not quality — and refining output means endless prompt rewrites. With Hightouch Ad Studio, AI gets you 90% of the way there. For the final 10%, use a built-in editor to quickly refine copy and design. Move faster without losing control.

See how Ad Studio works

🔨AI Tools for the Shift

📚 EduSolver – Solves homework questions with step-by-step explanations from typed text, pasted problems, or uploaded photos.

💬 BeyondComments – Analyzes YouTube comments to reveal what viewers loved, misunderstood, requested next, and which replies matter most.

📄 NDORFlow – Scores job opportunities against your CV and generates evidence-backed resumes and cover letters built to pass deeper scrutiny.

📘 BookCoversLab – Fixes bleed, spine, and sizing issues to generate print-ready Amazon KDP book cover PDFs in one workflow.

🎶 Melody Genie – Helps artists create hooks, verses, lyrics, and full songs using AI tuned to their unique sound and style.

🚀Quick Shifts

📽️ ChatGPT for PowerPoint now lets users generate and edit presentations directly with prompts, using documents, images, and source files through a built-in AI sidebar inside Microsoft PowerPoint.

🤝 Anthropic is reportedly exploring Microsoft’s Maia AI chips for Claude workloads, signaling soaring compute demand even after its massive $15B SpaceX infrastructure deal.

🎵 Spotify and Universal Music Group are launching licensed AI remix and cover tools, letting Premium users create fan-made songs while participating artists earn revenue from AI-generated music.

🎧 Spotify launched an ElevenLabs-powered AI audiobook creation tool, letting authors generate and self-publish audiobooks with realistic AI narration directly through Spotify for Authors.

🤝 Microsoft and EY unveiled a $1 billion alliance combining Microsoft’s AI and engineering teams with EY’s 400,000 consultants to rapidly scale enterprise AI transformation projects worldwide.

🧩 Prompt of the Day

Page Load Speed Analysis That Protects Conversions

Most websites lose customers before the page even finishes loading. Small delays create frustration, increase bounce rates, and quietly reduce conversions.

Turn speed optimization into a revenue lever.

Paste the prompt: Drop this into ChatGPT, then fill in your website details.

Prompt to paste

Conduct a page load speed analysis for [Insert website or landing page URL]. Measure the average load time across desktop and mobile devices and explain how slower speeds impact bounce rates, engagement, and conversion rates. Estimate the conversion rate changes caused by different load times and identify the biggest performance bottlenecks. Recommend optimization fixes such as image compression, lazy loading, script reduction, caching, CDN usage, or server improvements. Focus on improving user experience, reducing abandonment, and increasing conversions.

🤳AI Shift of the Day

That’s all for today’s edition. See you tomorrow as we track down and get you all that matters in the daily AI Shift!

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