Building This Journal With AI

I asked GPT-5 Codex to help me stand up this mini-journal, and we sprinted from “blank repo” to “live posts” in a single afternoon. Below is a quick retro for anyone curious how much work (and rework!) was involved.

1. Standing it up

• Initial scaffolding (≈45 mins): Markdown loader, excerpt helper, simple list/detail template, and light SEO metadata. By the end of the first hour /journal listed posts and deep links rendered markdown nicely.
• Styling pass (≈60 mins): Added typography, spacing, list styling, and responsive layout for both the list and article view. This also included the contact module that now appears beneath each journal page.

2. Bugs introduced & fixed (7 in total)

1. Header nav missing on /journal – PHP include path was relative; fixed with __DIR__ (5 mins).
2. Static asset URLs broken – CSS reset/layout paths needed to be root-relative (10 mins).
3. Journal slug routing – Built-in PHP router fell back to the homepage. Added explicit slug handling (15 mins).
4. Trailing slash redirect loop – .htaccess wanted /journal/. Disabled DirectorySlash and later routed through journal.php (20 mins).
5. Sitemap returning 404 – Apache rewrite wasn’t honoured; introduced sitemap.php, debugging helper, and an auto-regenerated static file (40 mins total).
6. Navigation duplication – Two “Journal” links fighting for attention; simplified to one handwritten badge (5 mins).
7. Mobile nav collapse – Centered desktop layout blew up on small screens; rewrote the grid and stack behaviour (20 mins).

Total debugging time: ~1 hour 55 mins, spread across the afternoon.

3. Changing my mind (a lot)

• Navigation style – We tried pill nav, centered nav, stacked nav, and finally landed on centered links with a handwritten journal marker on the right (4 iterations).
• Journal spacing & width – Adjusted article widths, contact module spacing, and emphasis styling multiple times to match the rest of the site (3 tweaks).
• Sitemap strategy – Went from “static file” ➜ “dynamic PHP” ➜ “dynamic + static fallback” as production realities surfaced.

4. Environment hiccups

• PHP built-in router vs. Apache .htaccess behaved differently (slug routing + sitemap).
• Trailing-slash rules on production forced real directories to shadow routes; renaming the journal folder and adding rewrites solved it.
• Needed a quick debug endpoint (sitemap-debug.php) to confirm rewrites were actually reaching PHP.

5. Credits burned

• Roughly 35k tokens of GPT-5 Codex usage (about £6 in API credits) to iterate, debug, and polish.
• All work completed in a single sitting (~4.5 hours including writing this retro).

TL;DR: GPT-5 Codex paired programming let me ship a fully functional, styled journal (with routing, SEO, sitemap, and a custom nav experience) in an afternoon. The rework wasn’t zero - seven bugs, multiple design pivots, and some classic environment gremlins - but the velocity made it absolutely worth the credits. Now that the scaffolding is in place, future posts (like this one) are just a markdown file away.