Note 02: A Constellation of Websites

These notes will not be linear. I want to tell you about a Codex project I completed a couple of weeks ago through which I will save ~$1,000 in software subscriptions over the next year.

I downloaded Codex the day it was released as a standalone desktop app. A couple of months prior, I had written three product ideas on my whiteboard under the heading “vibe code” but hadn’t started on any of them—until that day. I had developed the ideas in a series of conversations with ChatGPT, so I asked it to create detailed starting prompts for Codex. And over the next few days, I tinkered with my fledgling web apps and sent screenshots to friends.

Then, one week to the day after downloading it, I had an idea:

I maintain a small constellation of websites for my projects and businesses, the main ones being:

jacob--titus.com, my personal site
tuttstreet.com, my studio site
westsb.com, my blog about life in South Bend
vestedinterestbuilding.com, the building I own & operate
everydaymonuments.com, my shop

The first one, my personal site, is pretty simple: text, links, one image on the homepage, and then a gallery page for each of my three published works. I built it myself with Webflow—the homepage was easy, the sliders on the gallery pages took a couple of weekends last year to figure out. And Codex just… built it:

At first, it failed to notice the gallery pages, but with one more prompt it added those pages, complete with identical sliders and all of the photographs. I did not provide a single file.

Next, I created accounts on Github and Vercel, gave Codex access to run in my terminal and push to both of those accounts, and it was live. I said, “I'm starting a new thread to work on my studio website, same flow. Can you give me the instructions to pop into that thread based on what we’ve just done? It's tuttstreet.com.”

It replied:

So, I followed the same process and in one afternoon/evening, built and deployed new versions of:

The first two were previously on Webflow, the other two Squarespace. I cancelled all of those subscriptions. And I’ll note: West.SB is a 10-year-old blog with hundreds of articles and thousands of files, so Codex had to run a multi-agent process for a couple of hours for the initial build, but it worked just the same as the others in the end.

My shop is happily built and hosted on Shopify, so I’m letting it be for now.

And when I want to make edits, I just open the chat window in Codex, prompt the edit, say “push it” and not a moment later, it’s live. My friend Robert summed up the episode on LinkedIn the next day: