I didn’t know what to write about today, so I asked Codex to come up with ideas for this website. It delivered. A few of the ones it gave me:
- Self-updating featured link: the homepage automatically promotes the page that got the most clicks in the last 24 hours.
- “Popular right now” nav badge: one nav item gets a small badge based on live traffic, so the site visibly points people where others are going.
- Change log widget: a small box says “This site changed itself today” and only updates one thing, like the featured project or homepage tagline.
I went with the self-updating featured link.
It started building without asking too many questions upfront, and the ones it did ask came with solid recommendations attached. It seems to know what’s needed pretty well. I wasn’t too surprised it figured out the site already had analytics set up and could just use that to decide what to feature. Less setup for me.
At one point it said:
I have enough to draft, but I’m doing one last quick check on the event-tracking helper so the plan can name the instrumentation cleanly instead of hand-waving it.
Codex doesn’t want to be hand-waving it. Good for him/her/it.
After it got started, I figured I’d steer the conversation a bit. The plan was to completely remove the random experiment button from the homepage, which I didn’t want, but I only realised that too late. So I mentioned it, and the button stayed.
Building this took a bit longer than I expected. Probably because Codex is careful when there’s already a lot going on in a codebase and it doesn’t want to break something that already works. The new featured today functionality is now live on the homepage. Check it out.
Key Insight
The ideas came from the tool, but the judgment about which ones fit the site still had to come from me.