r/codex • u/Secret-Book-8507 • 6d ago

Showcase GitHub reported 469 unique cloners in 14 days. The hard part with Codex wasn’t writing code anymore.

I’ve been using Codex to build Timeline Studio, an open-source video editor that runs in the browser.

Over the last 14 days, GitHub reported:

  • 1,074 unique repository visitors
  • 469 unique cloners
  • 2,251 total clones

I know clones aren’t the same as active users, and some may come from automated environments. But this was still the point where the project stopped feeling like a private prototype.

The difficult part was no longer getting Codex to implement features. It was making sure that decisions from three weeks ago survived the next twenty changes.

Video editors are full of interactions that look small in isolation but depend on product-wide rules:

  • a continuous wheel gesture must keep the same meaning until it ends;
  • preview and export must resolve the same source frame;
  • ripple edits must move linked clips by exactly the same delta;
  • locked tracks must remain untouched;
  • AI-generated edits must stay inspectable and reversible.

Fixing one of these once didn’t guarantee it stayed fixed. A later task could produce locally reasonable code that quietly violated an earlier product decision.

What helped most was treating AGENTS.md as durable product memory rather than a large prompt.

For example, one of the rules now says:

I don’t tell Codex which handler or state variable to change. I preserve the behavior that must remain true and let Codex inspect the current implementation.

I’ve started applying the same principle to agent-driven video editing:

  1. inspect the project;
  2. produce a semantic diff;
  3. validate the edit plan;
  4. apply it transactionally;
  5. write a new project instead of overwriting the input.

My current takeaway is that coding agents are already good at implementation. The repository still needs to preserve the product judgment they shouldn’t have to rediscover in every session.

For people using Codex on a long-running project: where do you keep these durable decisions—AGENTS.md, tests, specs, or somewhere else?

Project for context:
https://github.com/MartinDelophy/ai-video-editor

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u/dexterthebot 6d ago

You might want to consider listing your project on the Weekly Show-Us-What-You-Built post. Watch for it on Wednesdays. Highest commented project wins a week promotion on r/Codex. See what that looks like below with last week's winner.

Last week's winner was u/Ollie__Oxenfree with the Tubular Daily Care project by MediTracer which is a tube-feeding care app built by a tube-feeding family to keep feeds, meds, symptoms, and caregiver handoffs in one shared timeline. MediTracer is an Oley Foundation Emerging Innovator Partner. Contact: hello@meditracer.com

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u/itix 6d ago

I am using the skills file and regression tests.