Pull Substack post stats with Codex Computer Use and rank posts by new subscribers

Charlie Hills, who writes a Substack about AI, used Codex with Computer Use to collect post statistics from his publisher dashboard, since there was no MCP connector for it. Codex worked through the dashboard pages and saved a report covering all 122 published posts, one row each, then checked that its count matched the dashboard total so nothing was missed. He then had it rank the posts by how many new subscribers each brought in, and used that ranking to decide what to write next. A repeat run on 16 September, using the same saved instructions, reread every page and caught the updated numbers. His rule from the exercise: use an MCP connector when one exists, and Computer Use when it does not.