Ask the Agent, Then Eight Sites

Instructor: the room controls for this activity, and the room display for the projector.

Friday, September 25. I’m away today. You’re not: you meet in the room at 12:30 as usual, and this page runs the class. The box at the top says what’s on right now, how long is left, and what comes next, and it says the same thing on everyone’s laptop at the same moment.

Your agent got an upgrade last night. From today it runs on GPT-5.6 Terra, a larger model than the Luna you’ve been using, which should do better at longer, harder requests. You don’t need to do anything: it’s already Terra, even if Codex still says Luna. If you’d like the name to match, pick GPT-5.6 Terra from the model menu when you start a new conversation.

Why Today

You’ve each built one thing by talking to your agent. That’s enough experience for the question most people never ask: how do you work with it well? Not in general, but you, with it, on the site you just made. So today you ask it. Your agent has kept every conversation you had while building your site, and it can read them back and tell you what it saw.

Then you do what a studio does with anything worth knowing: compare notes. One agent’s advice to one person is a guess. Twenty agents’ advice, argued over by twenty people who were all there, is something the room can agree to follow. The list the class arrives at is yours for the rest of the semester.

The second half is on your own: go and see how much range there is in personal websites, because the sites you showed last week were good and alike, and you can’t ask your agent for something you don’t know exists.

How Today Works

The times are the plan, and nobody is going to call them out, so keep an eye on the box at the top or on the tab’s title, which counts down too.

Being here today means two things. I’m not in the room to see who came, so the work says it for me. First, meeting three different classmates in the rounds: a round counts once you and your partner have saved a list together, and it can only happen during the rounds, in the room. So be there at 12:30: the rounds start at 12:40, there are three of them, and they can’t be made up. Second, finishing your eight, which you have until Wednesday, September 30 at 12:30, when the vote opens. The list at the bottom of this page ticks off as you go.

First: Ask Your Agent

Open Codex in your website’s folder, start a new conversation, and paste this in:

I just built my first website by talking to you, and now I'd like to get better at working with you. From your side, what makes a conversation with you go well, and what gets in your way?

Before you answer, look back at the conversations we had while building my website. Codex saves them on this computer in the sessions folder inside ~/.codex (on Windows, C:\Users\<me>\.codex\sessions), one file per conversation, in folders by date. Find the ones about my website (not this one) and read what I typed and what you said back. If you can't find them or can't open them, tell me that and stop; don't guess. Only read them: don't change or delete anything, and don't show me anything that looks like a password or a key.

Think about the whole conversation, not just how I worded things: what I did after you told me something was finished, how much I asked for at once, when I told you what I wanted and when I told you how to do it, what I told you when I came back to it later, when I disagreed with you and when I just went along, and what I could have asked you that I never did.

Then give me your most important advice for working with you, at most eight pieces. For each one:
- say it in one plain sentence, as advice to me;
- quote something I actually typed that shows it (or that shows I already do it well);
- write how I could have said it better.

I'm not a programmer, so please skip the jargon. And be honest: I'd rather hear what I could do better than be told I'm doing great.

It will take a minute to read back through your conversations. Then read what it says, slowly. Some of it will sting a little; that’s the useful part.

Then open your three and write down the three pieces of its advice that you think matter most. For each one, if you can, copy something you actually said that shows it, and write a better way to say it. The pair is what makes advice real: “be specific” is true of everyone, and “I typed make it better and should have typed make the headline big enough to read from across the room” is true of you.

If your agent says it can’t find or open your old conversations, don’t fight it: ask it the first paragraph on its own, and use what you remember of building your site for the examples.

Then: Three Rounds

Each round is eight minutes, with someone new.

1. Find someone near you. Two people, or three if the room comes out odd. Someone you haven’t worked with today; the page will remind you if you have.
2. One of you types the other’s code. Your code is on the rounds page. Whoever typed it holds the pen first; either of you can take it.
3. Start with what you each brought. The page shows both of your lists side by side. Read them to each other. Where do your agents agree? Where did one say something the other didn’t? What surprised you?
4. Write the list you’d both follow, up to five, each with an example if you have one. Copy in what you’re keeping; rewrite what you’d say better together.

In the next round, the list you just made comes with you and meets someone else’s. Three rounds of that and the lists in the room start to look alike, which is the point: that’s the class agreeing.

The talking is the work. It can feel like interrupting someone; it isn’t. Talk in whatever language you share, write things down before you say them if that helps, and a pair that goes quiet for a minute to think isn’t broken.

From the second round, the page offers each pair one question from the course, chosen from what agents themselves say helps and aimed at whatever your list hasn’t touched yet. It’s a question, not an answer, and you can ignore it.

What the Class Arrived At

When the third round ends, the page reads every list in the room into the class’s own eight, with how many pairs named each one and in whose words. Beside it is something I’ve kept from you until now: what the agent told me in August, when I asked it the same question. Look for where they meet, and where they don’t.

Then: Eight Sites

At 13:04, on your own: find eight personal websites that are both effective and distinctive, and say in a sentence or two what makes each one so. Everything you need is below. Give it the rest of the hour; you have until Wednesday at 12:30 if you need it, but I’d rather you did it here, together, where you can turn a laptop around and say “look at this one.”

What Counts

You’re looking for one person’s own website: the site somebody made to say who they are. A designer’s portfolio, a writer’s home page, a scientist’s site, an artist’s, a student’s.

• Not a company, a studio, or an agency. About half of what the design galleries show is studios, so look for a name that belongs to a person.
• Not a profile on someone else’s platform. A LinkedIn page, an Instagram account, or a GitHub profile isn’t a personal website. (A site hosted somewhere, like someone.github.io, is fine.)
• Not a classmate’s site, and not mine.
• Not one somebody in the class already has. Each site belongs to whoever found it first. When you paste an address, your eight tells you at once if it’s taken. It won’t say by whom. Keep looking: there are thousands.
• It has to allow itself to be shown inside another page, because next week’s vote puts two live sites side by side. About four in five do. The page checks when you paste the address and says so if this one doesn’t. It’s still a fine site; it just can’t take part.

And it has to be both of two things.

Effective means it works. You can tell who this person is and what they do, you can find what you came for, and it does what it’s evidently for, whether that’s getting hired, getting read, or just being found.

Distinctive means you’d know it again. Cover the name and you could still say whose it is. It made a choice that most sites don’t make, and the choice fits the person.

Plenty of sites are one without the other. A clean template is effective and forgettable. A wild experiment you can’t navigate is distinctive and useless. You’re hunting for the overlap, which is small, and that’s why it’s a hunt.

Where to Look

Every one of these has its own kind of sameness, which is worth noticing in itself: where you look decides what you find. Try more than one.

Galleries with pictures, fast to browse:

• personalsit.es: over a thousand real people’s sites. Mostly developers unless you use the tags, so use them: designer, writer, photographer, artist, musician, illustrator. There’s a random button.
• SiteInspire, portfolios: expensive, quiet, Swiss. Everything is tasteful and almost nothing is strange.
• minimal.gallery, personal: chosen for being minimal, so strong on effective and, by design, short on distinctive. Find the exceptions.
• One Page Love, personal: single-page sites. Clean, and very alike in structure.
• Awwwards, portfolios: loud, animated, and award winning, all in the same way. Twenty in a row start to look identical. Is it effective, or just impressive?
• Brutalist Websites: ugly on purpose. Very distinctive, all in one direction. Some links are old and dead.
• Neocities: thousands of handmade sites in the spirit of the 1990s web, and the widest variety on this list by far. It’s unfiltered and some of it is adult, so browse it the way you would anywhere public.

Lists without pictures, slower, and the best place to find something nobody else will have:

• Gossip’s Web: musicians, poets, artists, writers. Handmade and odd, with a random button.
• blogroll.org, an Are.na channel of artists’ sites, Marginalia’s explore page, and a Hacker News thread where two thousand people posted their own sites.

You can ask your agent, or any AI, where else to look. But open every site yourself and look at it the way you’d look at a classmate’s: what do you see first, who is it for, could you find what you wanted? A list of eight addresses you never opened isn’t what today is for.

What to Write

Two sentences or so for each find, in your own words.

What makes it effective? What is it for, and how can you tell it works?

What makes it distinctive? What would you recognize it by with the name covered?

The test is whether someone could pick the site out of a lineup from your sentences alone. “It’s clean and easy to use” is true of ten thousand sites. “The whole site is one paragraph, and every project is a link inside a sentence, so you read her work as a story instead of a grid” is true of one.

Write them yourself. You’ll be able to tell a generated answer by the fact that it could be about any site, and so will everyone voting: your sentences are shown next to the site.

The Competition

This is a friendly competition, and here is all of it, up front.

Next Wednesday the class votes. Everyone sees two finds at a time, side by side, with the finder’s sentences and without the finder’s name, and answers two questions: which is more effective, and which is more distinctive? You never see your own. Enough of those comparisons and we get a ranking of every site the class found, a map of the whole field, and a leaderboard of whose finds the room rated highest. I’ll show it in class on Wednesday, October 7.

• It’s the sites that are ranked, and they’re sites you found, not sites you made.
• Nothing about it is graded. Finishing your eight counts for today. Where your finds land counts for bragging rights and nothing else.
• Your name is off the leaderboard unless you turn it on, on your eight. Either way, you always see where you placed.
• Star one of your eight as your bet: the find you think the room will rate highest. At the reveal we’ll see who called it.

Before You Go

Tell the course how today went. It matters more than usual today: nobody was in the room to see for themselves, so what you say is the only way I find out.

If you’d rather see it than read it, there are two walkthroughs, one for each half, recorded end to end on students’ screens and mine. Ask the Agent: the question going into Codex, your three, three rounds with a new partner each time, and the class’s list at 13:04. Eight Sites: a find going in, a duplicate being turned away, the two sentences, and where it all ends up.