This week I had a couple of chances to use Codex and Computer Use on things I’d never bothered with because they seemed too daunting.

First, my son and I are working on an iOS app together. The app is coming along well, and I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on it. But I’ve never released any of the apps I’ve built, because App Store Connect is a labyrinth. I’d started the process a few times and gotten overwhelmed each time. I figured Computer Use could help. I told it to walk through each step with me and ask when it had questions. I had everything up and running in under 15 minutes. I didn’t let it enter sensitive information like my bank account or SSN. When it reached those steps, it told me where to enter them in a browser it wasn’t controlling. So the app is in TestFlight now, and I’ll probably release it in the next few weeks.

Once that worked, I thought about other things I’d been putting off because they were complicated. Home Assistant came to mind quickly. I have a modest home automation setup with Hue lightbulbs, Honeywell thermostats, and a few other small connected devices. I run Home Assistant on a Synology. I’d tried setting it up a while back and left it half-done. I wanted a clean setup where every device had the right name and sat in the right room. I let Computer Use into my Home Assistant dashboard. It looked over the setup, sorted everything out, and asked me a lot of questions to learn what I was trying to do. Soon everything was set up the way I wanted. My end goal was to manage everything from the Apple Home app, and it got me there. It even went further and added my TVs, so I can turn them on and off with Siri. I don’t expect to use that much, but it’s still cool to have.

I’m excited to find more tasks like these two to hand off to Computer Use in the future.