Your Website

Wednesday, September 2. Solo today.

Part 1: Setup

Follow the setup page. It gets Codex installed on your laptop and pointed at the course: install the app, paste one line into a terminal, then open the app and paste a first message that has the agent check its own setup. It takes a while for some people and no time at all for others; that’s about laptops, not about you. If it fights you, wave me over.

That first message has the agent make a folder for your website. Open that folder in Codex, and before you ask it for anything else, ask it this:

What do you need from me to do this well?

Almost nobody asks an agent that question. It costs one sentence.

Part 2: Your Website

Make a personal website. It’s your portfolio: everything you build this semester will be linked from it, and by December it’s the address you send to anyone who wants to know what you’ve been doing.

Your agent can produce a hundred competent designs and can borrow from any site you point it at. What it can’t do is decide what’s yours. Aim for something with personality that also works, something you’d be proud to send people.

Everyone gets a domain name for it: distinctive, appropriate, and yours. Expect ten to twenty dollars a year; talk to me if that’s a problem. When something works, get it online. It can help to keep one copy to experiment with and a published one that the public sees.

If setup is the part you’re worried about, there’s a walkthrough: the whole thing recorded end to end, the page and the terminal side by side.

That’s the whole brief. How you get there is between you and your agent. Nothing is handed in; as the setup page says, I’ll be reading some of the conversations tonight.