Podcast portraits, AIM for agents, and a hand-tracking app
Recorded a podcast and worked on the visuals: portraits in Flora, then thumbnail options in Figma. Also played with a few ways to interact with my agents, including an AIM-style Mac app for Codex conversations and a news stream on the MiniToo. Somewhere in there I asked Codex to build a Mac app that could read hand gestures through the camera. That one needed some actual trying-it-out.
Turn podcast photos into consistent portrait assets with Codex and Flora
Our How I AI thumbnail designer needs good cutouts to work with. I had photos from a recording and an existing style in Flora, the image-generation board we use: a black background with purple light around the subject.
After I imported the photos, I had Codex operate Flora in Chrome using computer use. It set up an image edit for each pose, matched the lighting and background, and exported full-resolution PNGs with names our designer could understand. Later I came back with a two-person photo and had it apply the same treatment.
That took care of preparing a consistent set of source images. Our designer could start arranging the thumbnail instead of spending that time cleaning up each photo.
# Prepare portrait sources for a thumbnail designer
Use computer use in the open Flora board in Chrome. Inspect the existing portrait examples to understand the studio treatment before editing my supplied recording photos.
Create one image-edit node per pose. Preserve the person, expression, head angle, hand pose, and natural anatomy. Match the established background, clothing, lighting, and crop. Keep the whole head and relevant hands inside the frame with a little margin. Do not add text, logos, or thumbnail graphics.
Generate high-resolution 16:9 PNGs. Inspect each result for facial and hand errors. Export the full-resolution originals, name the files by pose, and package them with a short file list for the designer. Leave clearly named nodes in Flora so we can reuse the treatment for another photo.
Prototype a hand-tracking Mac app with Codex and Apple Vision
I wanted to try controlling my Mac with hand gestures through the camera. I described the idea to Codex, and it built a native app using SwiftUI for the interface and Apple Vision to recognize hand positions. It included a practice area so I could test gestures before using them to control the computer.
Then I tried it. Nothing moved. I told Codex what I was seeing, and it used computer use to inspect the running app and macOS permissions, then adjusted the controls. By the end, the prototype was recognizing my pointing gesture.
The useful part was that I could try the interaction and have the same agent look at the app with me. That got the idea far enough along to test what a hand-controlled interface could feel like.