A new feature for my blog, built using my voice
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Simon Willison built a new newsletters page for his blog by talking to Codex while cooking dinner. It mixed voice, live previews, and a coding agent into a working Django feature.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
Simon Willison shipped a new newsletters page for his blog, and the unusual part is how much of it he built: by talking to Codex while making dinner. The feature pulls together his free weekly Substack posts and his monthly sponsors-only updates into one public index, with archive pages and search support folded in too.
He kicked things off in the ChatGPT desktop app’s Codex tab, pointed at his local blog checkout, and used voice mode to steer the work. The setup let him keep a browser preview open so he could watch the site change as he spoke. When the model needed more detail, he could switch back to typing or paste in examples. That turned out to matter.
The build went further than a toy demo. Codex and GPT-6 Astra High created a new Django model and migration, admin configuration, templates, view code, and import scripts. It also pulled in newsletter data from several places: recent Substack items via RSS, older Substack items through an undocumented API, all of his published monthly newsletters from a GitHub repository, and his most recent private sponsors-only issue from a private repo.
The resulting pages show newsletters in reverse chronological order, mix the weekly Substack items with the monthly GitHub-hosted ones, and surface them on day and month archive pages without putting them on tag pages or the homepage. Weekly Substack newsletters link back to Substack, while the archived monthly newsletters live on his own site. The monthly posts also feed his site search once they’re public.
Willison says the toolchain was strong for this kind of multitasking, but not something he’d use as a daily replacement for typing. Once the work got into the weeds, he still preferred a keyboard for error messages, code snippets, and precise edits. That sounds less like a grand AI victory lap than a practical admission: voice is good when your hands are busy, and dinner is on the stove.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the real use case people keep missing: not “AI as a replacement for developers,” but AI as a way to keep moving while your hands are elsewhere. Voice coding looks silly right up until the alternative is sitting idle for half an hour. The boring truth is that the keyboard still wins for precision, which is exactly why the combo works.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog