How are you restricting your thinking now with AI versus designing and architecting systems the way you used to?
ASKED BY · Unknown · 14 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:21:56
Grant described how he challenged his architectural approach to a WordPress/CloudFront caching strategy by asking Codex (Claude with AWS access), which suggested a better solution (hiding the origin, using CloudFront for all traffic including admin with cache exclusions). He now uses ChatGPT in voice mode while driving to plan prompts, then converts these into markdown prompts for Codex to execute, which allows him to leverage AI's architectural suggestions rather than assuming his initial design is optimal.
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21:56That's right. Yeah. And then the other thing was I tore the whole thing down and then had it rebuild it in another new atmosphere. So anybody, this is all free. Anybody could just grab this whole thing, point their AI at it and say, go build this in Azure. So pull it all down and push it up. It should all work. You could fork it and make it into whatever you want.
22:22This is the thing that is kind of mind blowing to me now is how restricted I'm being in my thinking sometimes you know it's like i'm trying to get it to do a particular task i think there's probably john i'd be interested in your thoughts on this because from a from a design point of view i feel like i'm i have always been the designer like this is what i want not from sorry not from
22:53a visual design but from an architecture or or how the product actually works and the thing that's changing for me now is I don't necessarily know. I need to challenge my thinking about the best way to do something. And here's a solid example I was doing last night. And that is a simple WordPress site. I think I spoke about this before. It's a simple WordPress site. And I thought, actually,
23:17what I'm going to do is put CloudFront on the front so that it's completely cached. And so because the site doesn't change that much so why not just have the whole thing cached for 30 days and then do invalidations you know when you do um a new um new update and so the way i did it is i thought well i'm just going to have the origin as a separate name domain name and cloudfront as
23:44another domain name and so that was fine it was working okay except that it it started the client was starting to post origin URLs and getting confused because they were doing their admin through a different domain name than the public site is. Anyway, I was like, I still think this is the right way to do it, but I sat with Astra, you know, in chat GPT 6,
24:11and just said, you know, this is what it's doing. And it said, no, I think the best way is to move it all to CloudFront and then have the origin completely hidden and forbidden and then all of the admin is cash-free. And so I was like, okay, that sounds great, but that is like a 12-step process to get to that. And the reality was that I just said, okay,
24:41I'm going to wait till after hours and then I'm going to give again, people get scared by this idea, I'm going to give Codex access to AWS console. And it just did it all. And it's working really well, like the whole process. And so my point is that I thought that I had the right idea about how to separate this to make a really fast website.
25:10And it had a better idea and now has implemented it. And it's working incredibly well. And so now I'm at a point where I have to question, like, learning something first. So what I'm finding is that I'm doing a process of, particularly when I'm driving, I'll do chat TVT in voice mode and talk, and I'll plan out my codex prompts. And so now I'm asking all these questions, and it'll start asking me questions back about the project that I'm doing.
25:45and then I'll get off out of voice mode and then say, okay, now create this as a codex prompt or an MD, you know, like markdown file. And then that goes into codex and goes off and makes it. And it's, yeah, it's incredible. It's kind of mind-blowing. But another example was, I don't know if I said this the other week. I think I couldn't have because I was doing it
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