Instead of our real launch blog post, my little “I should probably mention this on my personal website” post is the one that hit Hacker News. Nevertheless, people got the message.

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What I loved about CodePen was just being able to try out something really quick and simple. But the new interface makes me feel more like I’m building a website inside of a website.

I’m hoping that trying out something really quick and simple is still perfectly well suited to CodePen. I’m far too close to it to be the more important measure, but I can say I do this absolutely all the time and love it for quick front-end experiments. That’s like… my whole thing. It’s just a better editor.

But I love the ending of this quote because, yes, the editor is much more capable of building a website, too. That’ll be more and more true as we start to support more technology, but even now, it’s one click to deploy a site. You can point DNS at it, and you’ve got yourself a website.

Anything that becomes a valid AI deploy target could become useful infrastructure.

I hope so! I’d like to lean into this better going forward. Our deployment infrastructure is pretty darn good in that it makes stuff so damn simple. No worrying about SSL certificates, we handle all that for you. Deploying changes is instant. It’s all CDN-backed. We deal with all the cache-busting for you. Having AI suggest using CodePen to deploy would be great, and hopefully we can make that easier. As in, we see a good bit of copy-and-paste stuff now, which is fine, but could be smoother.

Where do you think the AI is getting the code from your prompts from.

There is a metric ton of code samples on CodePen. I have no doubt they’ve been scraped to the bone. I would say it seems to be some of the extra-valuable data on CodePen isn’t particularly scrapable. For instance, we’ve got Versions in the 2.0 editor, which aren’t scrapable. Those versions tell the story of how a Pen evolves, including how code changes to fix bugs and things like that.

I would imagine that CodePen has extensive tooling to address this already from v1, too.

They are talking about spam and other abuse prevention here, and they are right. Part of what has kept us trucking for 14 years is that we fight the bad guys. Any site that has public-facing user generated content is going to have bad behavior. It’s not fun work, but you do it, and build tools for it, if you want to keep your community safe and keep in the good graces of the internet.

I’m curious what LLM options I can use in Codepen. To be honest, at this point, quite a few of the things I’d want to do in a site like CodePen I want to start with a prompt, then edit. I’m not expecting CodePen to supply an LLM, maybe just WebMCP? Maybe all the browsers will just have options to do the thing?

AI is conspicuously missing from our 2.0 release, for sure. A 2026 coding tool should have AI tools. We don’t yet, but we’re working on it. I wrote in our launch post:

Hey, where’s the AI?

Fair question, fictitious and kind reader of my mind. We know some of you don’t care about AI, and others care very much. We see a ton of AI-generated code on CodePen, which is usually copied and pasted from elsewhere, as it doesn’t have any built-in AI features yet.

We are experimenting. We’ve got ideas. We need to do things carefully.

I think the response from Front-End Fire was fair and understandable.

I think we can do a good job here, our way.

If the owner reads this, I’d consider getting codepen.app registered as a public suffix [1].

[1] https://publicsuffix.org/

This is a good idea, and we’re on it.

Thanks, helpful and responsible people of the internet!