Note
October 27, 2026
2 min read
Codex, Please Clean Your Room
By Cristiano Pierry
Ambitious work with Codex comes with an unexpected chore: clearing out old project environments, build output, and backups of backups.
About two months into working with Codex on a new computer, my 1 TB hard drive was 98% full.
We had been busy across dozens of projects: building interactive guides to explain recommendation algorithms, developing iOS apps, researching new recommendation systems, building evaluation tools, exploring a discovery brain, and researching AI decision APIs. Apparently, every project also needed to bring all its belongings and stay indefinitely.
I asked Codex to investigate. Hundreds of gigabytes were sitting across its directories: old project environments, dependencies, build output, recovery copies, and extra copies created to verify that the recovery copies worked.
Some of our retired projects had more living space than our active ones.
One archive contained a Git backup, a restored repository, a complete workspace, and another restored copy of that workspace. We were very prepared to recover. Less prepared to save a file.
Meanwhile, the custom skills I was worried about losing occupied a few megabytes. The instructions for doing the work could fit almost anywhere. The accumulated evidence that we had done the work required a small storage facility.
We eventually reclaimed hundreds of gigabytes while keeping the current projects, drafts, artwork, and skills.
I can now ask an AI to build an app, research an algorithm, or create an illustration.
I also have to tell it to clean its room.
This writing reflects my personal perspectives on product management, AI, and content discovery. It does not represent the official position of my employer or any affiliated organization.