OpenAI Codex is THE Best Model in the World at Strategy—5 Minute Quick Start Guide + 29 Prompts

Source: Nate’s Newsletter Date: 2025-10-27 URL: https://natesnewsletter.substack.com/p/how-i-made-a-new-ai-discovery-a-coding

Summary

OpenAI’s Codex — designed for coding — turns out to excel at strategic thinking, outperforming other models at structured problem-solving for complex decisions. The discovery: models optimized for code generation develop rigorous, structured reasoning that transfers well to strategy. Nate provides 29 prompts spanning AI implementation, product strategy, go-to-market, monetization, and organizational decisions, framing strategy as “sharp thinking about hard problems, communicated well” — relevant to anyone making consequential decisions, not just executives.

Implications

Agent-product positioning thread. The “capability emergence from unexpected training” pattern is a recurring theme in LLM development: models optimized for one domain (code) develop transferable reasoning skills in another (strategy). This has implications for how practitioners should evaluate models — empirical testing on their actual use case often reveals unexpected fit.

Enterprise adoption thread. The “strategy is not just for executives” reframe is a democratization argument for strategic thinking: if Codex can help practitioners think more rigorously about hard problems, it compresses the time to better decisions across the organization, not just at the top. That has real productivity and quality implications.

Watch: Whether the Codex-for-strategy finding holds as models evolve (later versions may equalize this advantage) and whether there’s genuine performance differentiation or whether the structured prompt framework Nate provides is doing most of the work regardless of model.