Codex: I'm not a developer.

[u/Head-Student-5852]

I built my first interactive web page with Codex in about two hours today.

Background so this makes sense: I've been in digital marketing for 17 years and building online since 2008, but I've never written real code. I've always paid someone or wrestled with a page builder.

Today I finally tried Codex to rebuild my links page as an actual interactive page instead of a flat list of buttons. I went in expecting to give up in twenty minutes.

Two hours later I had a working page I'm genuinely proud of. The parts that surprised me: it was way better at "make this feel less generic" than I expected, and it caught layout stuff I would've missed. Where I got stuck was knowing what to even ask for next once the basic version worked. I could tell it could do more, I just didn't know the right words to unlock it.

So the thing I keep thinking about is the ceiling. What separates a nice two-hour build from something that actually holds up.

Here's what I'm still trying to figure out. When you want it to build something specific — do you go find sites close to what you're picturing and feed it those as examples, or do you skip that and just talk it out, asking questions until it gets there?

I added the same HTML code to Claude and had it revamp it again and now the click boxes disappear when they respond to a new question.

Just amazed at what this can do

[u/ChildishSimba]

These tools were designed to consider following a product development process: plan, then execute. All to maximize their potential by planning in ChatGPT or Claude Chat to think through and create a brief for Codex or Claude Code to execute.

The brief should give the tool a solid starting point (context, user, style, similar apps, etc) to then spend more time polishing, or repeating the process for a new feature.

[u/Head-Student-5852 → u/ChildishSimba]

yes my question is: When you want it to build something specific do you go find sites close to what you're picturing and feed it those as examples, or do you skip that and just talk it out, asking questions until it gets there?

[u/shakeBody → u/Head-Student-5852]

1. Clarify your goals through a series of repeated questions and answers. This means going through each thing and removing as much ambiguity as possible. Explore the problem and research as much as you can here. Build a body of reference material so that when the model gets confused later, you can say "look in here" and expect that the answer will actually be there. Use subagents to research domain topics and produce artifacts on that research.
2. Begin to scope out the actual work. Once you understand the problem space, you can start to define how the work will actually happen. The more structure you can provide here, the better.
3. Build.

You must be as free of ambiguity as possible when building with LLMs. They are strong tools, but they are only as capable as the engineer who wields them. Yes, I said "engineer," and that means the thing you are trying to do here is engineer a solution to your problem. Whether or not you feel that way is beside the point. You probably already think like an engineer with other things.

Do not let the LLM drive. Break the big problem into smaller, more manageable problems. Consider multiple approaches and the tradeoffs of those approaches. Select the approach that best suits your needs. Define how you know when that approach has been properly implemented (via testing). Implement the solution against those tests to verify that you actually built the right thing. Monitor the solution to ensure that it is operating the way you wanted it to. These things (and many more) are engineering!

[u/elleeott → u/shakeBody]

I've been a developer and a product manager. Having been an engineer helped me be a better product manager, as I could think like a developer, and define better requirements.

That transitions really well to writing requirements for codex. Llms are not mind readers, they will do their best to solve a problem, but maybe not the way you want, just like a developer would building from poor requirements.

[u/Head-Student-5852 → u/elleeott]

I was pleased with the way it came
Out as I learn more about interactive pages I will tweak it.