CodePen Radio

Chris and Alex are talking this week about CodePen's biggest release since the 2.0 drop. It's live! We'll be working on CodePen AI forever, since it's a fast-changing technology that regularly adds new abilities. That sounds like a trite thing to say, but we lived it as we were building this. We started out playing with the best and latest open-weight LLMs we could afford through vLLM. Then we did similarly with Amazon Bedrock, trying more models out as we built our own harness. Ultimately, OpenAI's ChatGPT-6 Luna had such affordable pricing and high quality, and our harness was getting so good, that it made us feel ready to ship. CodePen AI is an agent-based approach to helping with your Pens. There is a new AI panel where you interact with it. By it, I mean Penny, our mascot and really the brains behind the operation. Ask it to build something, debug some code, optimize something, or even just explain some code or tell you how a particular feature of CodePen works. Time Jumps

Marie and Chris are on the podcast to talk about our very new v2 API. This baby (slaps the hood) can do it all. It's complete read/write access to all your Pens, Collections, and Assets. This API isn't hamstrung by anything, so the door is open to whatever you want to build. We've already seen people build a syncing engine, put their latest Pens on their blog as part of a Static Site Generator's build process, and more. Time Jumps

We've made several upgrades to uploading/hosting images on CodePen lately. One change, moving to the open-source file-uploading library Uppy, was driven by business concerns. But the benefits are good for everyone: uploads are faster, and the money we saved let us increase file size limits and total storage limits on the higher PRO plans. Plus, we added a cropping feature to images everywhere. Time Jumps Links

Stephen and Chris jump on the podcast to talk about our (ahem, super cool) deployment feature. Any Pen can be a website! Well, they kinda are already, but you know what I mean. If you're a PRO user all you do is click a button and the Pen is instantly deployed at a *.codepen.app website. From there, it's pretty trivial to update a domain you own's DNS records to point to it, if you want to. Subdomains are a good choice, partially because they are free. Why is CodePen a good place to host? We take care of the asset decaching, everything is CDN-backed and super fast, deployment is instant, it's DDoS proof, and it's just included in your PRO plan without silly complicated limits. Time Jumps

Marie and Chris talk about CodePen Challenges. We've been at it for many years! We get into the technology behind it, how we build our own CMS for it that powers the website and the emails that get sent about it. We also cover why they can be so beneficial for everyone involved. Time Jumps