Learn Codex on a project that has to ship.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk, have raised £5m+ for their own companies, and have been AI-native since the week ChatGPT shipped.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
Codex changed the shape of writing software. Long-running tasks, real diffs, pull requests an agent opens and you review. Almost nothing on the web teaches it at production level. The Academy is twelve weeks of using Codex (alongside Claude Code and Cursor) on a real product with auth, billing, Postgres, evals, deploys and observability — the same stack we used to rebuild our own companies.
Coding · Codex in production
Long-running tasks, multi-file refactors, agent-opened PRs reviewed at senior pace. Cursor and Claude Code alongside. Evals from week one. A deployed product by week twelve — on the workloads Codex was actually built for.
Commercials · selling Codex-driven backlog clearance
Codex is the long-running-task agent — teams with messy backlogs (refactors, migrations, test-coverage debt, framework upgrades) will pay real money to have someone fluent in driving Codex through them. Pricing per backlog cleared, the discovery call, a one-page pilot agreement. A paid pilot by week six.
Investment · raising on the autonomous-SWE wave
Cognition (Devin) raised at $2bn, Cursor $2.5bn, Replit Agent funded, Magic at $1.5bn, /dev/agents founded by the Android co-creator on the autonomous-SWE thesis. Codex sits squarely inside that fundraising lane. Cap table, ten-slide deck, financial model. A live investor pipeline by demo day.
Common questions.
Do I need OpenAI / Codex experience before applying?
No. We will have you fluent inside two weeks. The bar is willingness to do the work — the on-ramp with current AI tooling is shorter than it has ever been.
How does this compare to a Codex tutorial on YouTube?
A tutorial shows you the API. The Academy hands you a real product to build, the production conditions to build it under, and the operators who have shipped real revenue with the same stack. The deliverable is a deployed business, not a finished video.
Will I learn Codex CLI as well as the model itself?
Yes. The CLI is how serious teams drive Codex in production — alongside Claude Code and Cursor. You will be fluent in all three by week three.
What if OpenAI ships a new model halfway through the cohort?
They will. They have done it during every cohort we have ever run. The course is built around the underlying skills — agentic thinking, evals, review, deployment — which transfer cleanly between model releases.
Is this an OpenAI course?
No. We are an independent twelve-week vocational course. We use Codex, Claude Code and Cursor because they are what we use to run our own companies — not because any provider asked us to.
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us what you would build with an agent that ships pull requests for you. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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