CodePen 2.0
chriscoyier.net
chriscoyier.net
Amazing platforms like Glitch ran into this problem.
(Some did pull it off! Like how Vercel built a kingdom out of `now`.)
I think we can have complex things, but they can be simple (to use, to understand, to manage). But it is really hard to make a complex thing simple. The straightforward way is to make it complicated, and most items remain that way.
We need simple tools and we need complex tools. It's the middle ground that's hard to navigate.
I'm reading this a day after GitHub had a day-long outage on Actions. https://www.githubstatus.com/uptime/br0l2tvcx85d
anything hosted free will inevitably be abused by scammers, you need constant vigilance just to stay a step ahead
Watch out, good hackers find those words incredibly motivating.
I have absolutely no idea if CodePen is feeling pressure from their shareholders or want to cook before the IPO, but I often wonder why Spotify needs 3,000 [1] developers working full time on a streaming app.
4 weeks ago there was a thread about Spotify making over 4,000 production releases a day (or 10 in 10 minutes in another comment in that thread).
WinAmp has been dead for centuries but it's still a perfectly valid player, foobar is being developed by a single dev. Of course I do understand that these people have a lot of auxilary tasks at hand, and "music player" is just a small component of the whole system, but still, it feels bizarre to think you need such an army to maintain a working app.
I love cool features as much as the next guy, but I'm also a fan of coherent products that knows their identity.
[1] the number might be inaccurate but that's beside the point
What IPO is that?
(also, the sister site jsbenchit[1] has been one of the more reliable microbenchmarking tools among the various sites I've tried - most end up triggering deopts or introducing "noise" in a way that makes the output less reliable)
Anything that becomes a valid AI deploy target could become useful infrastructure.
The rate of humans testing things in a CodePen will slowly fall off, similar to Stack Overflow.
The rate of AI models deploying to CodePen 2.0 will pick up significantly.
In some number of years, the amount of code written per month by machines will dwarf all code written by humans from 1957 - 2027.
In that world, CodePen 2.0 is valuable. CodePen not so much.
It will be interesting seeing how this evolves. Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point. Still trying to solve it for my own stuff.
That said, I do wonder how valuable something like codepen is in the current meta. I really no longer look at code. I'm not referencing examples, I'm just prompting for what I want / inputting images as context.
Does it work? I'm a paid user, but set up a new free account to see if the deployment stuff worked there too (as I was linking to it from elsewhere) and it said I had to upgrade to a plan that supported it.
Have github pages done this? Has cloudflare pages?
Wish it had an advanced search that I can filter codepens for something useful like this: animejs, svg, forms; with the result being codepens that use anime.js around a form.
I'd probably use codepen as the defacto web ui reference if it had better search capabilities. Right now it's mostly github + blogs, but only because it's so hard to find anything worthwhile on codepen. Gold is there but it's deep under the strata with no willing to actually get it.
Edit: Just noticed that logging in is now required for search. I'm sure this is an attempt to prevent AI scraping, etc., but it's a big mistake IMHO. While I have an account, I don't log in much and tend to abandon sites that require log in. Among nerds, I'm probably not the only one like this.
I don't use it as much as I used to but every so often I hack something up in it for a quick PoC. I'll say the new ability to deploy got my attention. Really handy to be able to deploy a prototype or demo of something and toss it over the fence.
I think that makes sense. You are less fiddling around and only need CodePen when you are really stuck but AI solves many problems now.
The shift from sharing little HTML/CSS/JS components to a website builder is probably their answer to this problem. They want to position themselves to compete with a Loveable, Replit and others. It's probably not the same, a little more technical, but the direction definitely shifted.
Source: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codepen&date=all&geo=Wor...
But, lately. I often go to Gemini Canvas and just ask for some simple thing I want like "make a browser theme generator that lets me pick a base color and then the site picks graphic design principled colors for the rest of the theme's colors and lets me download a theme extension ready to use. Have a browser preview of how the theme will look in the page". < 5 minutes later I have such a thing. Sometimes I want to prompt for changes, other times I just want to tweak a few things by hand, hence, wanting it in codepen.
Which other alternatives do people use now days?
Anyway, the main uses case I see for these playground sites are:
1) small hand-crafted replications of suspected browser CSS bugs or the like, and testing possible workarounds. That often involves sending them to other members in the team (because I use Linux and Android, two colleagues in the team use Windows, and two using Apple products)
2) trying out some idea for how to make a particular component. Which is effectively almost the same as above, since that needs to be tested across browsers.
So I don't need bells and whistles beyond a simple text editor with code folding. That might not apply to everyone else.
Also, the exact same line of thought applies to js benchmarking sites, which is why I use jsbenchit (which is jsgist but for benchmarks). It also seems to be one of the few benchmarking sites without spurious de-opts of JS code, or noise from GCs triggered by the website itself in the middle of a benchmarking run.
[0] https://jsgist.org/, https://github.com/greggman/jsgist/
[1] https://jsbenchit.org/, https://github.com/greggman/jsbenchit/
It's closest to JSFiddle but completely static, hosted on GitHub pages. No server side processing. Projects are private, saved on localstorage and can be shared via encoded URLs.
This has been a really fun way to ramp up with LLM based coding and I learned a ton, and made a tool I actually use quite often.
VCS extensions for jetbrains and vscode could hook into an api and smoothly pull and push pens. This feature was always my hangup for using CodePen as a UI playground.
(meaning I found it hard to read and focus)