10+ Things You Should Build With AI Instead of Sending Files

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, 10 or 15 or even 20 sites that knowledge workers should build with AI. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
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Now, happy weekend, friends. It being a weekend, this is of course a long read style or big think episode. Although today we're going to do something a bit more practical that was inspired directly by a launch from this week. On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a bunch of updates to Codex. One of them was called Sites. And effectively, Sites is just a simplified way to take the things that you're building with Codex and publish them as a website or a web app that your team or friends or colleagues can interact with. I think the idea is, whereas in the past to actually publish something, you'd either need to have a hosting platform like Versel and a database platform like Superbase, and wire that together with Cloud Code or Codex, or alternately be using an all-in-one vibe code experience like Replit or Lovable. Now that sort of all-in-one experience is native to Codex, simplifying the whole process.
Now, one of the things that I think this both recognizes but also amplifies is the idea of the website or simple web app as a new unit of work output, i.e. a new anchor artifact in the knowledge workers toolkit. Now, for decades, knowledge workers have packaged thinking into different types of documents. Decks, spreadsheets, PDFs, e-mail threads, shared folders, etc. Whatever the menu of formats available was.
Importantly though, that menu wasn't chosen because the formats were the best way to carry knowledge necessarily. But the ability to use code to turn those artifacts into something more interactive, dynamic, updatable, was limited to a very specific few, and the literal cost in terms of money or distraction of other people in the company meant that a website wasn't really on the table as a format. AI has, of course, changed that cost structure entirely. Any semi-gapable person can now generate a useful, fairly good-looking website as easily if not more easily than they used to throw together a deck. And increasingly what we're seeing is that there are many artifacts in the Knowledge Worker kit right now that are actually better suited to being websites. So that's what we're going to talk about today.
First though, let's talk about the problems of traditional documents and artifacts that websites solve. The first one is the update versioning currency problem. I would be willing to bet that on your computer somewhere, there's 18 different versions of some file with a confusing set of file names like plan underscore v2, plan underscore v3, plan underscore final, plan underscore final final, plan underscore final v3, plan underscore final v8, etc., etc., etc.
The problem is that any sort of downloadable file is a snapshot of a moment in time. As soon as you send it off, the clock starts running on it going out of date. A URL and doing things as a website fixes that. It gives the knowledge a canonical home. When you continue to control the ability to update it, it means that whenever people land on that URL, it is the most up-to-date version. This saves time, cognitive back and forth, and creates information consistency across the whole organization. Now, this is such a big problem that obviously, there are lots of intermediate solutions for this. DocSend, for example, gives you the ability to update PDFs on the same link. Collaboration suites like Google Docs are meant to give you tools so that everyone can be working off the same version. But building things as a website is a more generalist solution to this set of problems.