Codex Sites Clearly Explained (and how to use it)

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
I saw that Codex launched Sites, and when I first saw the news, I was like, is this just a worse version of Replit or Lovable that's just inside Codex? But the more I dug into it, the more I realized it's actually worth understanding how to use it and how to get the most out of it. So today is a full tutorial on basically what the big announcement is around Codex Sites, how does it compare to the competition. We're actually going to go and live build using Codex Sites, and through that I'm actually going to teach you basically the best practices for using Codex Sites. So by the end of this episode, if you stick around, I'm going to teach you how to build a shell using Codex Sites, how to add memory using Codex Sites, how to add what's called safe actions using Codex Sites, and I'll explain what that means in the episode, how to create skills with Codex Sites, how to save gate using Codex Sites, and how to prove the loop using Codex Sites, which makes it work autonomously. Let's get into it.
So, what is the difference between Codex Sites and Replit and Lovable and stuff like that? So, I will say, Replit and Lovable and those products are really good if you want to one-prompt something, and it has an editor, it has a database, it has server, it has hosting. A lot of them have connections to domains as well, too. You can just register a domain within it. So, that's really amazing. But Codex Sites, if you live in Codex, and I'm starting to live in Codex, I mean, I think it was about a month ago, I had Riley Brown on the podcast, and I basically said, like, hey, convince me to use Codex. I'm in the anthropic ecosystem, convince me to use Codex. And now I will say it's a part of my daily driver. Yes, I still live in the anthropic ecosystem, but I'm also using Codex. And I think that if you are in Codex and you are putting just all your context there, what's really cool about Codex Sites is you can actually use that to go and build your ideas, your apps and stuff like that. And what's the coolest part about Codex Sites is it updates your app autonomously. So what does that mean? It means that you can have it basically create a personal website, say, and let's say, for example, go to my personal website. This is a static website. So I actually have to go in and basically, 158,000 people enjoy reading my newsletter, but when it becomes 160,000, I have to go and update it. But with Codex Sites, you can actually have it, so it automatically updates these things. It automatically creates, for example, guides based on my content. It automatically adds the different companies I work on. So it basically is this whole idea around autonomous product building. I've talked about this on the podcast before, but the idea around you're going to have in the future, and the future is now the present, basically agents going and updating products autonomously. But the thing is, it is missing auth. It's missing databases, it's missing payments, it's missing email sending, it's missing analytics, and it's missing a vault for secrets. So if you want something more simple, everything is in there, you're going to want to use something like Repet or Lovable. But if you understand a little bit about auth, if you understand a little bit about database, payments, stuff like that, and you live in the Codex ecosystem, and you are really interested in this whole idea around autonomous apps, Codex Sites are really, really, really cool. And I also say one thing, today you can't publish these websites, at least not to my knowledge, you can't publish these websites on your own domain and deploy it publicly. These are internal apps that you can share with your team right now. But obviously that's going to change very, very, very, very, very soon. So let's get right into it. So I was thinking that we can create a Startup Ideas OS, so basically a live board with columns, inbox, researching, validating, building, and killed startup ideas. And each card can have an idea, buyer, pain, proof, next step, and score. So this is something that could be an internal tool that I would use. And we're going to basically try to build it in six prompts. And like I said, as I build it, I'm going to share sort of the big takeaway. So the first thing we're going to do, let's go open Codex. So I created a new project here. I opened a new chat. And the first thing is, if you want to actually use sites, you have to invoke it at sites. So it works basically as a plugin. So I said, build the Startup OS. I'm going to go ahead and send it.