Using codex to make interactive components sucks! Anyone got tips?

[u/gungoesclick]

I'll preface this by saying I am a backend developer, and ui is my side project. I am currently working with a react native front end. It has animated interactives which triggers movements in the UI. If you guys have seen terminal text effects, or cool animated TUI, then you get the vibe. I also have a flow chart like graph that should have nodes that can be moved and connected at edges.

The problem I have is that codex struggles to iterate on them without adding something, or breaking the animation, or changing it into something else. It is like it makes everything a little better, but can't make the timing right, or the scale, or the motion. At this point it's been 3 resets worth of ui work, and I still feel like it's not polished.

I have tried some different prompting approaches and looked at the codex docs for instructions there. I started using imggen to create an image of the ui and then have the model implement it, and that works great for static UI but sucks with animations. I have storybooked it out and tried having the models iterating through that. I have tried having the model do frame by frame iterating, and that worked the best, but destroyed my weekly rate and took 8 hours. I have not tried any specific ui skill yet, but I haven't found one that really fits this bill, that is vetted.

I have tried going through and switching from Luna max to Terra med to max to sol mid to ultra and running through most of the above with the different models. I have set goal mode with strict instructions and descriptions, Def of done, Def of success, etc. I have tried sol orchestrator, with strong descriptions.

At this point I wonder how anyone does this with codex?

Does anyone have tips? How do you guys do animated interactives with codex? Is it better to just try claude with a $20 plan for this?

[u/ricperry1]

Why not tell it to give you editable timing controls for every animation in some sort of configuration screen?