Three weeks of building with Codex: from notes app to commercial product

About three weeks ago, on a Tuesday, I started building a notes app for myself. This was not my first AI-assisted coding project. I have probably built around 20 small apps by now, starting with very simple things and gradually taking on more ambitious projects as I gained confidence. I'm a professional designer, so product design, UX, UI and branding are my side of the work. Codex handled the implementation while I designed, tested, changed things and iterated. With some free time and enough confidence from the previous projects, I decided to finally build the notes app I had always needed. I tend to work on multiple projects at the same time, and I wanted an extremely simple way to keep large amounts of notes, tasks, ideas and project structure visible, movable and easy to reorganize. That became Nutsy Notes, a desktop-first notes workspace that runs in the browser. Notes, columns, lists, list items and text blocks can all be dragged and reorganized directly on the workspace. Yesterday I launched the first commercial version. Over those three weeks, what started as one app turned into a small ecosystem. The project ended up including: - Product design, UX and UI, including the main UI icons, which I actually drew by hand :) - Branding and visual identity - The Nutsy Notes web app - A desktop version - The public website with custom CSS animations and an interactive demo panel - A custom WordPress theme - A child theme - A WordPress plugin that replaces the traditional page-builder workflow - Another WordPress plugin for sending messages directly into the app - An in-app notification system for both the web and desktop versions - Privacy and consent handling - Google Analytics behind explicit consent - Local file storage and recovery - Licensing and commercial infrastructure - Product pages and launch material The WordPress page-building plugin came about because I wanted to keep WordPress for the CMS and infrastructure, but I no longer wanted to build pages using the usual WordPress tools. Now I design a page, use Codex to build it in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, including animations and interactions, paste the code into my plugin, and publish it as a normal WordPress page. WordPress stays underneath, but the actual page can be completely custom. The second plugin is basically a direct messaging channel into the product. I can write a message in WordPress, publish it, and it appears as a notification inside Nutsy, both in the browser version and the desktop app. Honestly, given Codex's speed, I thought the whole thing would take me less time. Looking at the actual scope of the project now, three weeks seems pretty fast :) I built the entire project with Sol 5.6 Light on the Plus plan and only used one reset. I did hit the five-hour limit a couple of times, which turned out to be good for the state of my yard. Three weeks ago none of this existed. And while I was preparing this post, Nutsy got its first paying customer. nutsynotes.com