Let me tell you exactly how this started.
I'm scrolling through tech Twitter, minding my own business, and OpenAI drops a blog post about their new coding model. Standard stuff. Benchmarks, charts, "state-of-the-art performance," the usual.
Then I read this:
I stopped scrolling.
They used early versions of Codex 5.3 to debug its own training. To manage its own deployment. To diagnose its own test results. The model helped build the model.
Are we living in a simulation? Because that reads like the opening crawl of a sci-fi movie, not a product announcement.
Alright hear me out I don't normally do testing on new models but this intrigued me a lot.
I had to stress-test this thing immediately. Not with a todo app. Not with a dashboard. I wanted to throw the weirdest, most out-of-comfort-zone design prompts I could imagine — and see if a model that apparently helped create itself could handle creative direction that most human developers would need days to execute.
The Setup
Four prompts. Four wildly different visual styles for a personal portfolio website. Each one packed with specific aesthetic direction, 12-16 negative constraints telling it what NOT to do, and exact content for every section.
One shot each. gpt-codex-5.3, high reasoning mode. No follow-ups, no corrections.
Prompt 1: 90s American Comic Book
Todd McFarlane's Spawn. Jim Lee's X-Men. Early Image Comics.
Halftone dot textures, POW/ZAP action bursts, speech bubble CTAs, angled comic panel layouts with gutters. I told it explicitly: don't use generic fonts, don't use a standard grid, don't make it look like every other developer portfolio on the internet.
The panels had actual gutters. Action bursts pulsed on hover. The palette was loud, saturated, and unapologetically 90s. Minor alignment quirks — ten-minute fixes. But the design intent? It understood it.
Prompt 2: New York Cartoonist Minimalism
The polar opposite. Saul Steinberg. Roz Chast. New Yorker covers.
Thin pen-and-ink line art. Generous whitespace. Wobbly hand-drawn borders. Witty margin annotations. I told it: no bold colors, no sans-serifs, no CSS gradients, no hamburger menus, no corporate startup energy whatsoever.
This one surprised me the most. Codex generated inline SVGs that actually looked hand-drawn — wobbly lines, crosshatch patterns, pen-sketch icons. The layout breathed. It didn't fall back to the standard card grid every AI defaults to.
Honestly, this was the prompt I expected to break it. A comic book style has clear rules. But "make it feel like a New Yorker illustration" is vibes. It's the kind of brief that makes junior designers ask twelve follow-up questions.
Codex just... got it. First try.
Prompt 3: Deep Space Sci-Fi Terminal
Nostromo from Alien meets 2001: A Space Odyssey.
CRT scan lines, glowing neon text on void-black, radar grids, HUD overlays. Skills as ship system diagnostics. Projects as classified mission briefings. Contact form as a communication terminal — "SENDER IDENTIFICATION" instead of "Name." I even asked for a hidden easter egg.
CSS-generated star field. Authentic typing boot-up animation. Glow effects balanced perfectly — bright enough for sci-fi, readable enough to use. And yes, it built the easter egg.
Prompt 4: Pixel Art / Minecraft Style
The wildcard. Design the entire website as a Minecraft inventory screen.
Skills in a 3×2 inventory slot grid with Minecraft-style tooltips — dark purple background, rarity tags like "LEGENDARY." Projects as quest log entries. An XP bar showing "Level 8" for years of experience. I specified: all animations must use steps() timing, image-rendering: pixelated everywhere, generate all icons using CSS box-shadow pixel art, no image files.
Pure CSS pixel art. Block textures from repeating gradients. Stepped frame-based animations. The inventory slots looked right. The tooltips felt right. It even hid a creeper easter egg.
What Actually Impressed Me
The "created itself" headline is wild. But what sold me wasn't the existential sci-fi of it all. It was three practical things.
Negative prompting actually worked. I didn't just tell Codex what to build — I told it what NOT to do. No generic fonts, no smooth gradients, no card grids, no "every portfolio ever" energy. And it listened. Each result had a distinct personality because the constraints forced it away from its defaults.
That matters. The biggest problem with AI-generated code isn't capability — it's that everything looks the same. Negative prompting breaks that pattern.
Asset generation was genuinely good. Every prompt said "generate all visual assets — no placeholders, no broken links." Codex created inline SVGs, CSS pixel art, code-generated star fields, hand-drawn borders — all from scratch, self-contained, no external dependencies.
Speed and token efficiency surprised me. These weren't simple prompts. Detailed aesthetic direction, a dozen-plus constraints, four page sections with exact content, high reasoning mode. Still processed fast without truncating.
The Bigger Point
Here's what bugs me about the "Codex created itself" discourse.
Everyone's focused on the existential angle. Simulation theory. Recursive AI. Should we be worried?
Fun questions. But they miss the practical truth staring us in the face.
The gap between imagining something and having it exist just collapsed.
I described four visual styles — styles requiring genuine design taste — in plain English. They materialized. Not perfectly. But well enough that the remaining work is tweaking, not building.
Honestly, the real shift isn't about whether AI can create itself. It's about what it lets you create.
A product manager who's never written CSS can now describe their vision and see it built. A developer with strong backend skills can now explore visual directions they'd never attempt manually. A freelancer who can't afford a designer can prototype four aesthetics before their first client call.
You're the pilot now. Codex is the ship. And a ship that helped build itself? Turns out it flies pretty well.
The Prompts
I'm sharing all four prompts — complete with direction, constraints, and specs. Grab them, stress-test Codex yourself.
Public Github Gist to all the prompts
Try throwing something weird at it. Something you'd need a few days and a mood board to build yourself.
A model that helped create itself can probably handle your landing page.
Couple of Announcements
Checkout a couple of Open-Source Projects created by yours truly -
Ukiyo-tone: Themes inspired by ancient japanese techniques
TerminalSnap: Imagine carbon.now.sh but for terminals! Create beautiful terminal screenshots for your own docs and blogs.
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