Besides the Corporate Sustainability job at my organisation, I am actively researching on AI-based solutions to increase efficiency and make the best of AI to improve working structures. Prototyping for new ideas and solutions are one of the most discussed task I do have. An idea needs to be in shape to express the functionality and process behind the idea. Therefore I played around with some of the new tools and stopped always at the pricing model. Some are using credits, others using tokens. But all are based on chat-gpt and I wondered why I need to pay additionally if I am already using chat-gpt plus for my daily tasks.
Open AI Codex
That was my kick off for another research task and I found Codex at the end. A built in Agent from open AI, directly in chat-got where you can create applications (apps) and websites without coding. I played around and it looked fancy. Some history and folders down below – you can type in a prompt and something will be started by Codex. But honestly, I haven’t had the feeling that I control what I do and additionally I had to go to GitHub to check the results. Not ideal for quick-fix projects and prototyping. It is probably me that thinks GitHub provides not the greatest user experience.
Codex on VS Code
I do normally code in VS Code. It is a massive tool and you need for sure some time to understand all functions. But if you make It and you remain with this IDE, you will have a great benefit of working with the tool. And the good news, Codex can be run as extension on VS Code. All you need to do is to install the extension (make sure it is originally from Open AI), and sign in directly to start prompting. The Terminal command will help you to start your app in your browser, you have full control about your files and folders and no credits or tokens counting makes you nervous within your development. At the same time, the IDE shows you all small steps of creating the application and you are always able to adjust the code yourself.
Advantages compared to loveable, base44, bolt.new and others
The biggest advantage is that you do not pay twice for chat-gpt power. You don’t need to pay attention on credits or tokens, most of them give you cryptic domains and “real” domains are in higher payment plans. You have everything in an IDE where you can adjust the code, you have control of code and files and you can be sure it is on your device. Honestly, if you need to publish it (online) you need some hosting-space somewhere and a domain package. In the most cases much less expensive than the payment plans.
But I also played around with BASE44 and I must say that all people that can prompt, can code with this tool. I vibed a fully functional member administration application with different roles, high security barriers, tags that users can set, an entire dataset administration and other functions. It took me 5 credits and approximately 10 Minutes time. A great solution for people without VS Code and/or coding experience.
The overall good news is that you can focus now on your idea and solution and not on learning coding languages like python, javascript or html and css. But it helps you to understand what’s going on. My take on the question if developers are obsolete in the future: I don’t think so. If the app is not operating, if an app is very complex, if you need to ensure certain functions.. you need to have a 4-eye check and some human experience to solve the problems.