Comment by danielvaughn
4 hours ago
I've been a CodePen user since the very early days. Have always loved the platform. I hate to be negative, but I'm honestly not a fan of the 2.0 release. What I loved about CodePen was just being able to try out something really quick and simple. But the new interface makes me feel more like I'm building a website inside of a website.
That's the hard part about tools like this. They're too simple to be used for anything important, and as soon as the creator follows that path you end up in a situation where it's too simple for anything complex and too complex for anything simple.
Amazing platforms like Glitch ran into this problem.
(Some did pull it off! Like how Vercel built a kingdom out of `now`.)
Solvable with reasonable defaults and putting most things behind an advanced section?
no, it's just not solvable... you can only mitigate
anything hosted free will inevitably be abused by scammers, you need constant vigilance just to stay a step ahead
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I suspect they're doing this because of AI.
Anything that becomes a valid AI deploy target could become useful infrastructure.
The rate of humans testing things in a CodePen will slowly fall off, similar to Stack Overflow.
The rate of AI models deploying to CodePen 2.0 will pick up significantly.
In some number of years, the amount of code written per month by machines will dwarf all code written by humans from 1957 - 2027.
In that world, CodePen 2.0 is valuable. CodePen not so much.