ChatGPT Codex is like 10 AI software developers (tutorial for beginners)

Join me as I chat with Ben Tossell to discuss how non-technical users can leverage OpenAI's Codex to build and modify websites without writing code. The video showcases a practical example of adding a new tab to a personal website through simple text commands, with Codex handling all the coding work. Ben explains GitHub basics, pull requests, and how to manage code changes while emphasizing that this approach makes coding more accessible to beginners. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:28 - What is Codex 02:38 - Explanation of GitHub and repositories 05:54 - Demonstration of adding a new tab to a website 10:53 - Why use Codex if you are non-technical 15:26 - Explanation of merging and closing pull requests 18:18 - Best practices for non-technical people using Codex 21:54 - Tips for Debugging using ChatGPT 23:47 - More advanced use cases beyond personal websites 25:30 - Cloning a Repo and using Codex 30:08 - Conclusion and Final Thoughts on Codex Key Points: • Codex is an OpenAI terminal product that allows users to type in tasks, generate code, and push it to GitHub without writing code themselves • The workflow involves creating tasks, reviewing generated code, creating pull requests, and merging changes • For non-technical people, Codex offers a more accessible entry point to coding than traditional development • Best practice is to start with simple personal website projects before attempting more complex applications: LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringMarketing — Vibe Marketing for Sale: http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND BEN ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/bentossell Ben’s Bites: https://www.bensbites.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Should you try Sam Altman and OpenAI's new AI engineer in the browser Codex? Well, in this episode, that's what we unpack. We do a live tutorial for non-technical people around how to use Codex to get the most of it. I brought on Ben Tosell. He's one of the most renowned people for explaining no-code tools for non-technical people. If you want to see more content like this, like and comment so I know to create more free stuff. Enjoy the episode.

• 0:44Greg Isenberg?

  Ben Tosell on the pod. He just went viral for talking about Codex. So we had to bring him on the Startup Ideas podcast to introduce us to Codex. What are we going to learn today, Ben?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Well, we'll find out. I think what I've seen is people talking about Codex as this is really good for like senior engineers and their workflow. And I don't like people telling me what it's for. I just want to figure it out myself. Can I use it? Does it work well for me? If so, it's a tool for me. So I'm non-technical. Always have to like disclaim that. I'm more technical than a non-technical person and less technical than a technical person. So somewhere in the middle. And I'm just making these tools work for me. So.

• 1:29Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. So today's going to be an introduction to Codex by a non-technical British man. And let's get into it.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Okay, cool. If you don't know what Codex is, it's effectively a way to type in a task. It will code it for you and then push it to GitHub. That's basically what this is. So here it is connected to my GitHub repo, my personal website, the main branch. And the website looks like this.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  This is it so far. So if we want to change something here, so I want to have another tab. It's like food I like. I'll just say add another tab next to investments tools that is called food I like.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  In the doc, put

• 2:35Speaker 01

  tacos.

• 2:36Greg Isenberg?

  So

• 2:39Greg Isenberg?

  because I want to, I want this to be true to the non-technical person. So you had to set up a GitHub. You had to create a website. How did you create that website originally?

• 2:51Speaker 01

  With Codex. Yeah. So yeah. So if you go back, this is something I did cover in my video, which you need to have GitHub connected. So yeah, GitHub is effectively a way for your code to be stored and you can like have, this is like what a profile looks like on GitHub, but not a very good profile, but a profile nonetheless.

• 3:16Speaker 01

  So you have these repositories, repositories, which are basically like, that's your project. So this one, for example, is my personal site. It effectively stores all the code files that you have. And then any changes you make, you commit them. So they're called commits. They all show up here. So you can see that it looks like I've been very busy.

• 3:38Speaker 01

  I sort of have, but I've been sending all these to Codex to do. And then you'll see some other coding agents in here, which we won't talk about in this video, but there's more other tools out there as well that I highly recommend.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  So that's very briefly what GitHub will do. And then you have to create a new repository. So when you've got a new,

• 4:08Speaker 01

  you want to do a personal site, you want to do a marketing site, whatever you want to do, you've got to create a repository for it. You type in any name, you can make it public or private, add a readme, just explains what your project does. Then create it and then you'll end up with

• 4:24Speaker 01

  the page that I was just on. Something like this.

• 4:28Greg Isenberg?

  Yep.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Um, and that's it. But then you're like, okay, well, what do you mean? Where's the project? Where's the like site then? Um, and I have linked mine here, but so what I, what I did actually to start this whole thing off was I had my site built on card, which is a no code builder that I've loved for years and it was doing fine. My site was up and live for years and I just didn't do anything with it. Um, and then I actually went and I just did like right click. I think I did V page source, which shows you the whole code that like serves the page. This is the code that is on my personal page. So whoever can go and look at this.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  So on the no code builder, I had this, I just did all copy paste into a coding. I actually used a different coding, coding agent factory to then say, put this on the code and put it on this GitHub repo. And that's where this then started off. Um, I've also connect, you can connect it to then GitHub pages, which then lets you have your URL live. And you can give that to people and have custom domains there. Um, I used VSL, so I'm just trying to be a bit fancier and that's another way to deploy stuff. And you don't really need to worry about that too much. Um, if it's like your first foray into sort of coding stuff, um, yeah.

• 5:54Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Okay. So websites live, we want to add something, want to change something. We, we add a task on Codex.

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. So another task next to investments tools that is called food alike in the dark put tacos. Um, so if I just, you can hit ask, which is just, it doesn't generate any code. It'll just tell you stuff about your code. Um, we'll hit code here and then it come up as a task here. And you can see these are all past ones where they show how many lines of code are added, how many have been removed, whether I actually merged it, closed it, and we can talk about merging, closing, all that kind of stuff in a sec. We'll see it firsthand. So when we go into this. Task, you can see it's doing a bunch of stuff that looks a bit like hackery that you see in the movies.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  It's just using the terminal to find different files, understand what the code actually says. You can see there, this is the code, this is my command palette modal. So I've got codecs to add this, when you do command K, it comes up with like shortcuts modal. So then I can type it, I can just do I or T and it'll navigate the tabs, that's just in my keyboard.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  So this is now, so I'm interested to see if it adds a new tab and if it adds that to the command line as well. If codecs are smart enough to like piece those pieces together.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  So here, it's yeah, saying, these are all the things that I'm doing. I've looked at each file, I'll check out what the documents look like. I'll create a new document for the new section with the title food I like and tacos, matching the style.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  I'll create the, and update the main site with a new tab. And it has said, I spotted a key event listeners for I and T, but no changes needed. I'll add a food tab. Okay, so that doesn't look like it's going to add its own. So the I and T is my keyboard shortcuts for navigating those tabs. I thought it would do that, but maybe because I didn't ask it to. So now it's still working on it, almost done.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  We'll see this in a second. So you can see that it's added two lines of code on the food document and more on the other one. This is what it looks like when it's done it successfully, it seems anyway. So I'll show you the files that's changed. This is the food file, this is the main like website file. So it's added another button, food I like, and added the.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Food piece here in the tabs. It did its own test. So Codex is like a use case they talk about a lot is testing.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And we can get into that a bit later on because I think it's a bit more technical than you probably need for this, like for this workflow anyway. But as we're here, we're like, okay, great. It's all worked. So if I go to my site, refresh it, it's not there. So I haven't actually pushed any of those changes. So this button is what you want to do next. Create new PR. So PR stands for pull request. And effectively, code is like one thread, just one line, which is the main branch. They call it branches. So it's your main branch. Every time you go and work on something

• 9:30Speaker 01

  else, it's a fairly standard practice to create a branch. So you basically take that code, you copy it over to like another version over on the side, you work on that feature. As long as that feature is successful and there's no conflicts with the main code base, then you can merge it back in and no issue should be there. So that's what we're hoping for today as well. So if you click View the Pull Request, so on my repo here, Pull Request, Add Food tab, Summary, gives you a quick summary of what it did. This is my, because I'm connected to Vercel for deploying, I can do that and see the testing stuff there. So that's something we can get into later. All checks have passed, no conflicts with the base branch, so you can merge

• 10:14Speaker 01

  it. So if we just merge that, that will then, you'll see that here, this pull request is coming in. So it's just pending. It might take a couple of seconds. And then, once we've done that, it'll deploy and we'll be able to see it on our site. So that loop is a bit long currently. And this is where we can get into the sort of testing piece and, yeah, running tests, environment, previews, like all of that is stuff we can dive into because this is the simplest version, I think, which is just like, write a task, get code, push it to your code base, see the change.

• 10:53Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, quick, before you get into that, why am I even using Codex? When I look at Codex as a non-technical person, it feels 10 times more overwhelming to me than some of the prototyping first tools like Bolt and Lovable and stuff like that. So why, why should people even, you know, besides playing with the tools is fun and it's good to learn, why should a non-technical person even do this?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Maybe they shouldn't, is my answer.

• 11:27Greg Isenberg?

  Great.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  I, I think, I mean, it's part of my job to just like test everything, but more so, I like to see where things feel like they might be going. So seeing Codex, the UI of Codex is very different to the UI of everything else. I mean, you could argue that like a Bolt would look kind of similar where it all got, it's got like the sidebar and then, I mean, I don't know if we've got any other builds here, so this is, what am I got, so it's got like the sidebar chats and then you've got your files, your code, you can see the preview, all that kind of stuff, you can

• 12:07Speaker 01

  deploy it, you can integrate with GitHub, like all of the same pieces are there. But I think what I find interesting about Codex is you don't look at the code or think about the code at all. I think you, you're obviously going to see it here, but I very rarely like look into any of these files. I'm only doing it to sort of demo it, but generally it would be like, okay, add this, okay, it just says, it says it's open, that's what, I'll talk about that in a sec. So it says it's open, I'm like, okay, that worked, pull request, did it, pass the checks, fine. And this you can now do on your mobile as well through ChatGPT, I think that you can do it all quite easily.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  So you can, you can see it will be sort of setting off mini tasks to an agent to go and do that. I think Bolt, you can do it, I guess, as a, on your mobile, but it's not going to be great.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  I just think generally text to app builders are overbuilding everything or completely setting everything up as an overbuilt tool. But actually, all the features are under built. So if you ask for like a Shopify, a Spotify clone with Bolt, it'll spit out like UI perfect, looks amazing. But all the pieces don't actually work. And when it's those pieces that you actually want to get working in order for it to be something that you can deploy and do whatever you want to do with it.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  So you focus on like the end piece and then you gotta work your way back through all the pieces that need to work. Which is actually hard if you ever have tried to do that. Whereas in this one, I'm very iteratively adding on to something and every time I'm adding a new thing. Technically, there are tests and checks and everything should be all fine. So there should be a lot less time spent doing work on things that are not going to work. Like things that I'm going to then spend hours debugging. I'll either just give Codex another task or try a different coding agent. So my workflow is kind of changing in that sense. Of like, I get the chatting back and forth when I'm trying to make something.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  And I think it's really helpful to have the like the ask version of these coding agents versus the coding ones, same as in Cursor. You like have one chat and you just ask about what's happening in my codebase, blah, blah, blah.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  But something about this feels a lot different and it feels a lot more like writing or like you said, this is your to do list. But you're not doing it to do, you're not doing any of the to dos. Some, something that's way, way more advanced than you is doing it in a way that feels delegated and off your plate. So I just think you start here and you can think, well, at some point, the like the PR stuff, that's going to be automated. Like, I'm sure you can get bots now that if there's a successful pull request, it'll just merge it to the main branch. So like, you never have to go onto GitHub. And then You can do, I think, I think the limit's around a task can last about 30 minutes or something until it starts breaking. This is early preview, obviously, so it's all

• 15:23Greg Isenberg?

  Yep.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  A bit on the fritz, but um.

• 15:25Greg Isenberg?

  Can we, uh, can you explain a little more about what we're seeing around merged and closed and what's happening?

• 15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but let me just show you, did this work? Okay, it did. The keyboard shortcut does not work. Um, but food alike, that all works fine. Tools, yeah, great. So that change all happened. So then this is merged. So that means it's been merged to my main code base, my main branch. It's all part of the main code base now. So if there's another branch, it'll have that code already in it. So when you, when you create a task, it starts off as open.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  You don't see any open ones here because I've either closed them or merged them.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  This is an example of one, I said, make a light and dark modes icon button switcher. And this is for a different test that I was doing. It made one, I looked at it as like when I was testing it and I was like, no, that's awful. So I just closed the pull request. You can just deny it basically like, hey, I want to make this change. And you're on that GitHub page, you're like, well, none of the checks passed, it didn't work or whatever. You can just close it and then just not use that. So none of that is affected. It was on a branch, your main code's fine. So you basically like, think about it, I guess, in the support sense, you open a ticket. Ticket's being worked on and then the ticket's closed. Sort of problem solved. That's kind of how, how I think about this anyway.

• 16:55Greg Isenberg?

  Wow.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  So yeah, that's, we've opened the task, we've merged it, we've closed it, it works on my site. I did no coding and I did

• 17:06Speaker 01

  maybe like four or five button pushes. Yes.

• 17:10Greg Isenberg?

  And the numbers that I see next to merge and close, I see like a positive number and a negative number. What, what are those numbers? Do you even know what those numbers are, Ben?

• 17:19Speaker 01

  I do. They are the number of lines of code changed. So plus 12 minus zero, didn't take away any code, but we added 12 lines of code. Across your whole code base, it's not just like in one file. Um, generally that's, yeah, that's what it is. So even on my personal sites, I have this, which I haven't worked on yet, which is, I obviously tried to copy the Codex UI and that's what I used for this inspiration. But yeah, I've got these numbers here, they don't actually work. But this one actually pulls in the live GitHub repo. So any changes I make are reflected in there every 15 minutes. So I don't know if we just, did we just do 12 lines?

• 18:03Speaker 01

  We did, yeah. So that actually is the updated one. So if I click on that, then it'll show me the commits of what I just did. Just again, a little thing I just said to Codex, try and do that. And I did it like no problems.

• 18:19Greg Isenberg?

  Before we go, you know, you've been playing with Codex for a few days now.

• 18:25Greg Isenberg?

  What sort of best practices do you have for, for non-technical people who, who are playing with it?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Oof, um, I'm worried about like what people will do and then call me out for. Uh, but I would just start really simple, like use it on your personal site or create a new personal site if your precious is about yours. The, one of the first things I did, like I mentioned, was like, okay, I've been on this no-code tool builder for God knows how long. It'd be nice for me to just have the site in code. So I can make any changes in any like weird and wonderful extra pieces that I'd like. So just do it line by line and like piece by piece. You can see all of these merged pieces, like add a food tab. I could do that in the code myself. Remove this text animation, add keyboard shortcuts, add a dark light mode switcher.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  So like all of those things, they're all like nice to have fun, interactive things that you see on other people, like other developers' websites that maybe you just don't have on your own. But I would just start with, make sure you have a GitHub repo and it has at least a read me, so you can just enable that when you're creating one. And then just go from there, say, okay, make a website with my name as the header, create an about section and then create like some social links and go from there. And then I think it's just. Playing around with everything and just merge stuff, close stuff. Um, the thing about GitHub that is good, but it's not that easy.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  I don't think anyway, is if you have merged something that then your site's completely fucked up. Like I did it before where the site just wasn't loading anything. I was like, oh shit, what have we done? You can always go back to a previous version that did work. So if like that food tab thing broke a bunch of stuff on the site. I'll be like, uh, okay, I'll go back to this. So I can go back to this. And all of these are like, just disregarded. The code was never there. Don't worry about it. So there's no real danger of, if it's like a personal site that isn't client facing, money making, whatever. It's something that you're just working on. You can iterate on and add like weird, wonderful funky things.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  There's no real risk of like anything happening other than your site changing. Um, and then when you get stuck, ask ChatGPT, like, hey, how do I roll back this GitHub stuff? Um, how do I like, I want it, because the thing you can't do in Codex, so there's some limitations here, obviously. Like you can't upload any files, you can't upload any images, you can't say, make the UI look like this. So me trying to do the UI piece was a challenge. Um, but then you can go to other tools like V zero, generate some design stuff, bring that code in here. Or you can deploy that on GitHub and point that here. Like there's loads of ways to do it. Um, yeah, I just start small and iterate even smaller.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  And it's just getting a feel for like, could I see myself coding like this? In the future, like in six months' time, am I going to just think this is so obviously how everyone should be writing any code? Like I don't, I can't write a line of code myself, bar like the minimum stuff. But I can ship all sorts of stuff with tools like this and. Especially it being mobile native. Just feels like. I'm gonna be shipping all the time.

• 21:54Greg Isenberg?

  Uh, when you say ask chat GPT if you don't understand something, do you mean going to chat GPT dot com? Or do you mean going to chat GPT dot com slash codex and hitting the ask button?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  I generally go to chat GPT dot com and then I'll change between the models to see what I, what's going wrong. And the good thing about using chat GPT is you can still say like, look at this repo. Or you can try and there's some other tricks as well, like um. You change the first letter of GitHub to U, so U it hub. You'll see this, which is, which looks like a lot of text, but this is all the code that is involved in my. Site. So I basically copy all of that and it's going to be ninety nine thousand tokens. I can copy that. Go to chat dot com.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  And then that's, yeah, and just say um.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  My personal sites. Are there any like bugs? You just do like that kind of thing. Um.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  So I just tend to do that. I haven't really used the ask. Think I did it here. So I asked, how do I ask you to push changes to my staging environment? How do I check the staging from a UI perspective? And it can do it and it's, but it's more connected to, it's not connected to the internet. So it's like, I'm just looking at your repo and answering based on what it has, what knowledge it has. To give you that response, whereas I'd prefer it to be. Based on my code and also various sites that I can go and look up. How I can help you fix this thing. So generally, that's what I've been doing.

• 23:45Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, good tip. I also like your tip around try this for, you know, well, you kind of said like there's levels to this. Level one is build a personal site.

• 23:57Greg Isenberg?

  What are the, what are the next levels? Like after you've built a personal site, you know, what's level two, three and four as you're learning about codex?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think I haven't seen anyone. I saw someone tweet about this, like, has anyone used codex for like working with databases or authentication? Cause they're like, there are a few steps up to deal with those. Then there's things like MCP, which are making a lot of this very, very easy in things like cursors. So it's again, maybe I'll just be patient and wait for MCP stuff to be in codex. Or maybe I don't use codex anymore and Claude have just released their SDK and there's a version on that. Like there's all different ways that this is probably going to go anyway.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the first step is like, it's just getting you to getting you down the rabbit hole. Like, oh, I can use this thing to code onto a site that I own and can see. Cool. What would I want to add? And even on your own site, you start going, it would be great if an integration with GitHub could pull in the latest information. Like even that is, I would say, a next mini level up.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  It really depends then on what, what kind of things you're into and want to build. But I think there's, there's obvious things like having user sign in, sign up. There's like people saving or bookmarking items in your product or whatever you're building.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  There's the database layer. There's like the whole AI piece is another, another thing.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  But the best thing about this whole space is there's so many open source, like repos on GitHub. So you are going to be spending time on GitHub. That just, I mean, I think there's a, there's a guy who works at Together AI, Hassan, who always releases.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  All of these open source.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, all of these open source like mini AI tools. So this is like a summarized PDFs. Okay, great.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  And then they're always open source and this like might even look scary, but it really it's clone the repo, which is clone the code base by using that.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  And for that today, you'd have to use some of the other coding tools. But I think it's like, it's gonna be fairly soon where you can just, I mean, I could, I might be able to do it now. We can try. So if I fork it and then just do that. So that I've now got that code.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I wouldn't just change the name and say it my code, but that's, that's what it is. So then if I go to Codex,

• 26:44Speaker 01

  I'll need to go to my environments to create the environment, basically connect the right repo. What was that called? PDF, something.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  It might just, they are smart PDFs.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  So if I just do that.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  I think the UI needs to be. So then if I click into that. How do I get this code up and running?

• 27:14Greg Isenberg?

  And dumb question.

• 27:17Greg Isenberg?

  Like, why did you need to create a separate environment for smart PDFs?

• 27:21Speaker 01

  It's just, so they called it environments and it's just like a different connection. So it's a different place that it's talking to and writing code to. Because like you can see here, these are all.

• 27:33Greg Isenberg?

  It's like a folder.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's effectively that. So I think even the fact that you have to go into environments, create an environment, doesn't feel intuitive.

• 27:43Greg Isenberg?

  No.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  It just feels like you should be able to, I don't know, an add button here that is just like connected new repo.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  But the environments piece is much more advanced than that, which is why it's probably done this way. So

• 28:00Speaker 01

  here they have this piece, the code execution piece, which I haven't actually touched yet.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  But often if you have code like what Hassan's got, so I assume that's, that's why I asked that question. Cause I think it's going to be helpful to show a bit of that is.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  Where is the code?

• 28:27Speaker 01

  So yeah, I see here, when you're running, to run this app, you need to run "PM, PM install", so that's a terminal command. You've got to run this, and you're going to run this, which feels a bit crazy and like, I don't know what you're saying if you're a non-technical person. But if you're in Cursor or some sort of actual coding environment, there are terminal commands to basically spin up the servers and the things that you need in order for the app to work.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  But with Codex, for it to be able to interact with your code and see it properly, you need to run those commands. So here is where you say, it gives you examples there, but it's like, "PM, PM", whatever it was,

• 29:12Speaker 01

  "install", and then whatever the other ones. So you have to put them here. This is like proper development environment. When you're building something that is a bit more, it's got frameworks like NextJS, Python, whatever. Like, it's got things in it that's more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which is more what I talked about today in the personal site context.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  But yeah, I want to do this. I want to test this out. And

• 29:42Speaker 01

  yeah, there might be a follow-up video to say, "I was wrong", or that it was really good. So, yeah.

• 29:49Greg Isenberg?

  Cool. Let's leave it at that. I want to get more technical and more down the rabbit hole for this. Ben, thank you for being generous with your time and your sauce. I will include where to follow Ben in the show notes. Highly encourage people to go check him out and his newsletter, Ben's Bites. Anything you want to...

• 30:11Greg Isenberg?

  Leave people with Ben.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  I think all of this looks scary or feels scary and there's too many things launched all the time. So that's just the world that we're in unfortunately. And I think just like getting to the point where you feel like maybe just test this one thing and on this one simple site idea and this one simple feature, you've just got to start there. And I think the whole point of what I do with my newsletter and like what I tweet about and record videos on every so often is trying to make it less scary for a non-technical person. Like today, it wasn't a planned like tutorial style. This is how you can do these things. But my video might be a bit more, this is like a really more structured way, like showing

• 30:56Speaker 01

  you actually how to set up the projects and stuff. But it's not that scary. Like, I know it's easy to say from the other side of the fence, but I've been non-technical forever and been talking about no code forever and all those other things. So I come from that world of I can't code, code is scary, what is GitHub, what am I supposed to do with it? And I'm just getting curious enough to go past those barriers to then be like, oh, I've got a site live and now I've got 50 live and I've got all sorts of different apps of different complexities. And like, once you go to the rabbit hole, you're going to start wanting to do more. Once you've figured out that. So don't set yourself up

• 31:39Speaker 01

  for failure with maybe do a Spotify clone and then deal with all the bugs in the middle because it'll just be a nightmare. You'll never want to do it again. Like start with one simple thing, try and do that. If you fuck it up, then ping me, I guess. Yeah.

• 31:55Greg Isenberg?

  Amazing Ben. Yeah, my, you know, just my takeaway from from you showing this is it does feel overwhelming, like just the semantics, the terminology, GitHub just itself feels like a behemoth. That being said, I think that playing with codecs is almost like a lightweight way to learn how to code in some ways. Like it introduces you to a lot of computer science and development terminology in a lightweight way and like a bit more of a fun way. So.

• 32:33Greg Isenberg?

  Whether you end up using Codex or you end up using Bolt, for example,

• 32:40Greg Isenberg?

  you know, it just, this is going to make you better at building with AI, period. And the lovable and Bolts and curses of the world are probably going to introduce a to-do list, task-based UI in the future because it just kind of, it makes a lot of sense. So my take is, will I be using Codex every day, Ben? I'll be, no, I'm not going to be using it every day. Will I be using Codex this weekend as a learning project to play with my personal website? Absolutely.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think it is that terminology that you've got to get over a bit. And I did a write-up, actually, it was on our Substack that's like GitHub for non-technical people, trying to dispel some of that scary stuff. But yeah, I mean, I think the same. And it's more that like, you'd rather do one thing correctly.

• 33:30Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  Than the big thing and then like, this introduces coding to you. It drip feeds it, I think, with, you've got to set up GitHub and then you can start coding. That's fine. With the text-to-app builders, you can just type a prompt and you start building. Great. But it's not the same thing. You still end up at the same place at the end of it. You still have to deploy it. It lives somewhere. It's probably going to live on GitHub. Like, it's going to end up in the same place. It's just how you enter. And I think what you mentioned with, is this going to be the place where someone learns about coding or like, this is where they write their first line of code or AI writes it for them? I kind of feel like this is a better place to start than a text-to-app builder because,

• 34:16Speaker 01

  like I said, it's going to build a big fancy thing. And what you're going to end up in is like seeing a bunch of terminology, code being written, tests failing. They're all to do with now you have to help the AI solve these bugs. That's a way deeper, like, place to start swimming than here, I think. So that's what I think is interesting about this. It's like, it really doesn't feel like coding. But it is. And it's come from the, like, almost top-down, bottom-up, like analogy you could think about here, maybe.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  But I don't think it's built like that. So it's obviously meant for the whole stack. So it's, yeah, we'll see.

• 34:55Greg Isenberg?

  Ben Tossa, everyone. Thanks for the time. Hope you learned something.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Cheers.