Your Codex rollout workbook.

A short working session for you and your team, about 30 minutes. Don't just read it, fill it in. By the end you'll have your first tasks scoped, the guardrails and permissions agreed, and a review and secrets policy written down. Type straight into the boxes and save as a PDF, or print it and write on it.

The loop, in brief. Codex is a coding agent: it reads your repo, plans, writes and edits code, runs commands and opens a pull request. It is leverage on well-defined work, not a replacement for your engineers. Hand it bounded, checkable jobs, run them in a sandbox with least-privilege access, and read every diff like a contributor's. The loop is scope, run, review, merge. Tighten the brief or the context when something comes back off, and keep a human on every change.

1Where could an AI coding agent help?

Brain-dump the bounded, checkable work your team would happily hand off: test gaps, tidy refactors, bugs with clear repro, glue code, small internal tools. Don't filter yet. Quantity first.

The task or job	Who owns it	Blast radius

2Your first two or three well-scoped tasks to trial

Pick the ones from above with a clear definition of done, low blast radius, and no production secrets in sight. A few real tasks beats a vague plan to "try the agent".

Task 1: Task 2: Task 3 (optional):

3A task scoping template

Write the brief for your first task here, then reuse the shape for the rest. If you can't scope it cleanly, break it down or keep it yourself.

Goal (one clear outcome, like a ticket for a capable junior): Context and files (the area to work in, plus how to build, test and lint): Acceptance criteria (the test that passes, the behaviour you expect): Out of scope (what to leave alone):

4Guardrails and permissions checklist

Agree this before you set anything loose. Least privilege: the minimum access the task needs, no more. Tick what's true, and write the specifics where it asks.

It runs in an isolated sandbox, off our environment where we can. Main is protected: required status checks and a required human review before merge. Every change lands on a branch and in a reviewed PR, so it stays auditable. An AGENTS-style instructions file is in the repo (build, test, lint, conventions, gotchas). What it may touch (repos, areas, commands): What it may not touch (production, infra, anything off-limits):

5Review and secrets policy

A little governance lets the team delegate with confidence instead of guessing. Green tests are a start, not a sign-off. Keep it to these lines.

Who reviews the diff or PR before merge: Secrets handling (where they live, the scoped tokens we use, what the agent never sees): CI gates that must pass before merge:

Your Codex rollout workbook.

Sent, thanks.