Going Live
Two students get their websites onto the internet side by side, each with an agent that knows the day's plan and hears when the other's site goes up.
What You're Looking At
This is a rehearsal, not a class. The students are invented: they're the personas we use to test this course on itself. Wherever an agent or a companion speaks, its words were generated by gpt-5.6-luna, the model the course ran on until September 24, recorded once and replayed since so the run comes out the same every time. Everything else is the software students use: the real pages, the real proxy, the real timer, the real companion. The one thing standing in for itself is the terminal, because students work in Codex and a browser can't record a terminal; that pane shows what genuinely passed through the course's proxy, and never invents output for a command that wasn't run.
Three kinds of substitution are made for publication, and only these three. Where a screen would show the rehearsal rig's own 127.0.0.1 address or its scratch folder, it reads as the real one instead. A setup token is shortened, because a token should never be shown whole even when it's a throwaway from a test database. And where a film needs a website that isn't anybody's, a student's own site or one a student went and found, it is an invented page served by the rig, shown under an address ending in .example. Nothing else on any screen is altered.
The brief the students actually read is the activity page.
Step by Step
Three plans in the list now. Geoff picks Going Live and presses Start: the room is on Get Paired, and a code appears on every student's page.
The first section asks the same thing as last time: can you see a change on your own laptop within seconds? If not, get a local preview before you pair. It matters more today, because every change after this is a redeploy.
Priya types Jordan's code. Nobody is observing today: both pages say “You're both building”, and each shows the other's conversation with their agent. No notes, no companion, no switch.
Under the banner, where each site is: neither is online yet. That line changes on its own the moment the course has checked an address, on both pages.
Geoff presses Next into Get Online. Forty-five minutes on the plan, and it loops, because a room getting its first sites up takes however long it takes.
Jordan asks his agent to get the site online. He doesn't say how, because he doesn't know how. The agent does, and the course has already told it what today is for.
The request that reached the model ended with the day's note: the task, what a good host looks like, the suggestion of a domain, who is sitting beside him, and a link only his agent has for reporting the address. Every word of it is on the activity page.
The agent gets to work. Its tool calls are shown as requests and not run, because this pane stands in for a terminal; in class it runs them, and the site is up a few minutes later.
Then the one step that touches the course: once the site loads, the agent fetches the link from the note with the address on the end. The walkthrough makes that fetch itself, against a stand-in for Jordan's site on this machine, and the terminal shows the course's actual reply.
Both pair pages notice within a few seconds. Jordan's says his site is online; Priya's gives her his address as a link, because the next thing she does is open it on her phone, off the wifi.
Geoff has the sites page open beside the room. Everyone on the roster, online first, with the sentence their agent was given; it refreshes itself every ten seconds.
Priya sends her own agent a message, off camera. Hers is the request that gets the line: the course tells her agent that Jordan's site just went online, with the address, and gives it one sentence to end with, marked Course TA.
Her conversation reaches Jordan's page a few seconds behind, the way his reaches hers. The Course TA line her agent ended with doesn't cross over: the feed keeps the course's lines to the student they were for, so Jordan sees her request and her agent's answer and nothing else.
Priya goes and looks, then tells her agent what she found out, in her own words. The course reads that against what Jordan's agent actually did: it has his record too. In this rehearsal the address is on this machine and the deploy was never run, and both her agent and the course's read say so; in class it's a real one.
Her next message carries the course's read: whether her account matched his record, in one line to her agent. Nothing is graded; the agent can pass it on or let it go.
Geoff presses Next into Make It Yours. For Jordan's agent the switch already happened: the note changes the moment the course has checked an address, whatever section the room is on.
Jordan's next message gets the second note: his site is online, checked, and the task now is making it unmistakably his. His agent is told to start by asking about him, and that Priya beside him is a stranger's eyes.
Feedback is the last section, as it is every time; the button is on their page. Then Geoff presses Stop. There are no notes to reveal today, but the session has to close for the nudges to stop and for attendance to count it.
Closed. Both pages go quiet, and the address stays with the course: the sites page lists Jordan online after the session too. Anyone whose site isn't up yet keeps the first note in their agent until Wednesday's class.
Recorded September 11, 2026.