I had some success doing two front-end projects. One in 2023 using Mixtral 7b local model and one just this month with Codex. I am an experienced programmer (35

I had some success doing two front-end projects. One in 2023 using Mixtral 7b local model and one just this month with Codex. I am an experienced programmer (35 years coding, 28 professionally). I hate Web design and I never cared to learn JavaScript. The first project was a simple touch based control panel that communicates via REST/Websocket and runs a background visual effect to prevent the screen burn-in. It took a couple of days to complete. There were often simple coding errors but trivial enough to fix. The second is a 3D wireframe editor for distributed industrial equipment site installations. I started by just chatting with o3 and got the proverbial 80% within a day. It includes orbital controls, manipulation and highlighting of selected elements, property dialogs. Very soon it became too unwieldy for the laggard OpenAI chat UI so I switched to Codex to complete most of the remaining features. My way with it is mostly: - ask no fancy frameworks: my projects are plain JavaScript that I don't really know, makes no sense to pile on React and TypeScript atop of it that I am even less familiar with - explain what I want by defining data structures I believe are the best fit for internal representation - change and test one thing at a time, implement a test for it - split modules/refactor when a subsystem gets over a few hundred LOC, so that the reasoning can remain largely localized and hierarchical - make o3 write an llm-friendly general design document and description of each module. Codex uses it to check the assumptions. As mentioned elsewhere the code is mediocre at best and it feels a bit like when I've seen a C compiler output vs my manually written assembly back in the day. It works tho, and it doesn't look to be terribly inefficient.