Nathaniel Whittemore

I think the idea is, whereas in the past, to actually publish something, you'd either need to have a hosting platform like Vercel and a database platform like Supabase and wire that together with Cloud Code or Codex, or alternately be using an all-in-one vibe code experience like Replit or Lovable, now that sort of all-in-one experience is native to Codex, simplifying the whole process.

Now, one of the things that I think this both recognizes but also amplifies is the idea of the website or simple web app as a new unit of work output, i.e.

a new anchor artifact in the knowledge workers toolkit.

Now, for decades, knowledge workers have packaged thinking into different types of documents, decks, spreadsheets, PDFs, email threads, shared folders, etc., whatever the menu of formats available was.

Importantly, though, that menu wasn't chosen because the formats were the best way to carry knowledge necessarily.

But the ability to use code to turn those artifacts into something more interactive, dynamic, updatable was limited to a very specific few.

And the literal cost in terms of money or distraction of other people in the company meant that a website wasn't really on the table as a format.

AI has, of course, changed that cost structure entirely.

Any semi-capable person can now generate a useful, fairly good-looking website as easily, if not more easily, than they used to throw together a deck.

And increasingly, what we're seeing is that there are many artifacts in the Knowledge Worker kit right now that are actually better suited to being websites.

So that's what we're going to talk about today.

First, though, let's talk about the problems of traditional documents and artifacts that websites solve.

The first one is the update versioning currency problem.

I would be willing to bet that on your computer somewhere, there's 18 different versions of some file with a confusing set of file names like plan underscore v2, plan underscore v3, plan underscore final, plan underscore final final, plan underscore final v3, plan underscore final v8, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The problem is that any sort of downloadable file is a snapshot of a moment in time.

And as soon as you send it off, the clock starts running on it going out of date.

A URL and doing things as a website fixes that.

It gives the knowledge a canonical home.

When you continue to control the ability to update it, it means that whenever people land on that URL, it is the most up-to-date version.

This saves time, cognitive back and forth, and creates information consistency across the whole organization.