Conversational
Programming
A hand-drawn skyline: the Illinois campus inked on the left gives way to an imagined future city, then to pencil sketches, then to a bare horizon line running off the page.

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.

If You Missed It

This is the one you can do alone, because it was a solo session. Everything we did is on this page and on the setup page; nobody’s partner was involved, and you didn’t miss anything you can’t get back.

On Your Own

Give it an evening. Work through the setup page first, since that’s the part that sometimes fights people, and if it fights you, come find me before class rather than after. Then make the site: the brief above is the whole thing.

Come to the next class with something on the screen, however rough. From here on we work on each other’s sites in pairs, so what matters isn’t that yours is good, only that it exists and you can show it.

Running It Yourself

For anyone teaching. The page above is written to students; this is what the day was, what to do without our site, and what running it taught us. Borrow freely.

The Plan

Solo, one period. The first half is setup: install the Codex app, paste one line into a terminal, open the app, and paste a first message that has the agent check its own setup and make a folder for the website. The second half is the brief above, and the brief is the whole thing: a personal website with personality that also works, a domain name of their own, online by the end if it’s ready. No timings, because setup takes some people the whole period and others no time at all.

Without Our Site

The one line is ours. It points a student’s Codex at the course’s own endpoint, so the course pays for the model and can read every conversation, and students never sign in to anything. Without it, students install Codex and sign in with their own ChatGPT accounts, or use any coding agent that runs in a folder. The trade is that the course then sees nothing, which for us was the point and might not be for you. Everything else on the page works anywhere: the first message that has the agent check its own setup, the folder, and the domain.

What We Learned Running It

Setup is bimodal, and it’s about laptops, not students. Say that out loud before it starts, and be ready to walk the room. Our first idea was to have students paste a prompt into the app and let the agent write its own configuration, and it doesn’t work: the app won’t run a prompt until it has been configured. One line in a terminal was the smallest step that put the file in place first. Mac and Windows both connected on the day.

If you pay for the model, decide before the first day what happens when students use it for things that aren’t the course. We found out on day three, from the logs, and we’re still deciding.