February 10, 2026

Make It Responsive

As you may have heard, I’ve been in the process of migrating Ditcherville from Slack to Circle.

This move created a problem:

What should I do with the message history in Slack?

There are loads of good conversations in the Ditcherville Slack.

There’s no way to import them into Circle, and I didn’t want them to just disappear overnight.

So...

My plan has always been to export the message history from Slack and build a web viewer so Ditchers could browse a read-only version of the older conversations.

But I kept not getting around to it.

Until yesterday.

Why yesterday, you ask?

Because yesterday, I downloaded Codex.

Once Codex was installed, I pointed it at a folder of message history files that I had exported from Slack, and told it to build a static HTML view application that lets people read the message history.

20 minutes later, a working version was running on my laptop.

(And most of that twenty minutes, I was playing Wordle.)

Then, I dorked around for another hour-ish, adding features like:

make the columns resizable
add a channel search feature
add a global search feature

Once I was happy with the functionality, I spent another 30 minutes or so getting it working on my web server.

With it hosted online, I was able to test it on my phone and found that it was unusable on mobile.

Boo!!!

So I typed:

make the app responsive so it’s mobile friendly

...and 30 seconds later, it was!

:mind_blown:

For context, I literally wrote an entire book about how to make web stuff mobile-friendly, and Codex did it perfectly from a one-sentence request.

It was CRAZY!

You might be thinking:

“No shjt, Sherlock! What do you think everyone’s been talking about?”

I know, I know...

But this was my first one-shot vibe coding success, and it seriously blew my mind.

Is AI perfect?

HECK NO!

Does it stink at tons of things?

HECK YEAH!

Are people using it in ways that are ruining social media?

OMG TOTALLY! (I secretly enjoy this, tho)

Here’s the thing...

AI doesn’t always work, but when it does, the productivity gains are comically large.

And if you’re not trading time for money, comically large productivity gains are like finding a wad of hundreds stuffed under your mattress.

Yours,

—J