I built this site with Codex

So, this was an experiment that I’d like to share. I decided to rebuild my own website with AI. I decided architecture, tools, security requirements and design theory and gave it requirements. You’re reading the results. The site isn’t complicated, but for a small business to get a redesigned site, with security minded review, its a huge decision making process, vendor selection, iterations and time – LOTS of time, which small business owners don’t have. This is a huge step.

The coding of the platform and the interactions I had over three days with Codex, however, was pretty fantastic. While I have experience in building WordPress sites, I didn’t open wordpress once – until I had this post in draft mode, which I edited in the wordpress editor, as one would in normal content creation. I didn’t write complex prompts, either. I wrote in normal language, even conversational – my point of the experiment to was to see if I could stymie or break the process – but it never faltered.

I kept AI positioned where it could best help, without giving up control.

I decided that I wanted Codex to replace a web developer, so I connected Codex to my staging instnace at Kinsta / WordPress. This is the testing and development environment you use to build behind the scenes, before releasing to the production WordPress. Codex was connected using secure SSH keys I built specifically for this job to the STAGING environment at Kinsta only. Importantly, I made Codex tell me line by line how to make the SSH Keys. In between development cycles I reset the password for the SSH keys, removing access – something Codex recommended.

Importantly, in the security review process, which AI is not known for, I simply took the CSV of my reports from the scanner and pasted them in and said to fix. It pushed back on items that were ports that cloudflare requires open and don’t cause an undo risk. It pushed back on items that were mitigated by cloudflare, but open in WordPress and I said we needed to fix it regardless – and it went and patched the code. Three separate instances it required changes be made at the edge level where Kinsta lives to ask them to make specific changes for Content Security Policy items being flagged in our security scans. Importantly, I decided to only be a cut and paster with Kinsta – that means, all I did was use the mouse and keyboard to open the support tools, but all of the messages to Kinsta I copied from instructions Codex gave me. When Kinsta support asked questions, I put those back in Codex and got responses to push to Kinsta. We worked through each issue until it was resolved.

After my first release to Production, I wanted to add a second cycle of development, so I added a blog / update posting tool with webhooks to LinkedIn and BlueSky. Codex handled both by first proposing a post system with webhooks using Zapier to connect WordPress to LinkedIn and Bluesky. Codex gave me accurate instructions for each step and I had very few second efforts, but as it was an experiment, each time Zapier didn’t work correctly, I took screenshots and pasted them into Codex and said “it didn’t work”. Codex found answers each time until I could clear all the issues and release to production.

Here’s the point of all of this – development as an industry is about to change significantly – not just for Silicon Valley companies with billion dollar valuations, but for Mom and Pop small businesses, entrepreneurs with great ideas, smaller Software as a Service companies – it’s all going to evolve more into better statements of business logic and system requirements – that’s where the magic has always lived – but now accessing it and iterating again and again, faster, quicker and with fewer headaches is going to accelerate – I don’t know, maybe everything?

Every one of my clients are confronting AI – and I say, let’s get after it. Let’s identify problems you need to solve and where it’s possible, let’s use AI to help with designs, with proposed architectures, let’s let it write some code and then check it’s work. Don’t sit by the side of the road on this – it’s far too important.

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