Comment by ttul

6 hours ago

I had been procrastinating putting in the effort to find a decent web designer to redesign our company’s website because I couldn’t stomach the hours I would need to put in to educate them about our messaging and to slowly go around and around iteratively to get the design nailed.

Last week, I decided to try building the site myself using Codex (the terminal one). I chose Astro as the framework because I wanted to learn about it. I fed it some marketing framework materials (positioning statements and whatnot) and showed it some website designs that we like. I then asked it to produce a first cut and it one-shotted a pretty decent bit of output.

AGI is definitely a few more years away, because I’ve since invested probably 30 hours of iteration to make the site into something that is closer to what I eventually want to launch. But here’s the thing: I never intended for Codex to produce THE final website. But now I’m thinking, “maybe we can?” On my team, we have just enough expertise and design know-how to at least know what looks good and we are developers so we definitely know what good code looks like. And Codex is nailing it on both those fronts.

As I said, we’re far from AGI. There’s no way I can one-shot something like this. It requires iteration with humans who have years of “context” built up. But maybe the days of hiring a designer and just praying that they somehow get it right are behind us.

PS: Yes, I spent several hours on the weekend getting Codex to add animations, sound effects, and a mini game to our home page hero graphic. That was fun. I look forward to the creativity that people unleash with tools like this in the coming months.