16: How Codex Fixed a Year and a Half of Bugs in Four Hours

About this Episode

Big episode. Kris crossed the line. John's running out of tokens again. And there's a lot of ground to cover.

Topics covered:

[0:00] Intro & Back From Summer
[1:17] Kris Installs Codex (Finally)
[3:36] Founder Fellowship: 5 Vibe Coders Walk In
[6:20] Hot Take: Will You Even Need to Learn to Code?
[9:36] Getting Unlocked vs. Getting Generic Answers
[11:06] AI Art in Client Brochures — A Trust Problem
[13:23] Automating Social Media with Box Out
[17:34] Trial Reels, Algorithm Games, and Quantity Over Timing
[20:09] Onboard Your Own Product — On Repeat
[23:50] Fireside New Site & Automated Weekly Emails
[26:34] GStack: Build a Feature From Scratch With Bumpers
[30:11] Building a Founder Fellowship Tracking App
[33:47] Todoist + MCP — Logging the Admin Work That Doesn't Count
[35:28] Flare Performance Reports Every Morning
[38:49] What's Shipping at Fireside This Week
[41:10] OpenAI Astra: Burned a Week of Tokens Before Breakfast
[48:14] The Virtuous Loop: Codex Fixed 18 Months of Bugs
[52:00] Recommendations: GStack, Astra & Leaders Eat Last

Mentioned:

• OpenAI Codex / Astra
• GStack (Gary Tan / Y Combinator)
• Flare: app performance monitoring
• Box Out
• Speaker Deck
• Fireside.fm
• Momentum Founder Fellowship
• UserList — lifecycle email
• Todoist + MCP integration
• Cloudflare (for building lightweight apps)
• Jesse Hanley / Bento
• Grok / Grok Bot

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Standing in the Fire is produced in South Bend, Indiana.