# 2025-10-25

It's been about 2 months since my last gemlog update. Life has been very busy, both work and personal.

What inspired me to write today is that I've been using ChatGPT Codex a lot recently, and have come to appreciate it immensely. I have created several tools that I *could* have created myself, but would have run out of creative steam long before completion. To whit:

* vessel - a gemini client whose name I shamelessly ripped off from amfora
* go-gruvbox - a Go package that provides 'ergonomic' access to gruvbox colorscheme representations
* timeblock - a timeblocking application that I have been using at work
* witness - a TUI for an AI-driven story adventure game.

timeblock and vessel are particularly impressive, to me. They wouldn't exist without Codex, and they actively enrich my life.

What I enjoy most about Codex is how well it can diagnose bugs. It generally gets things done first try, and third at the worst. TUI apps are especially handy because I can just copy and paste graphical issues into the chat window and it can sort them out.

And the best part is that I have *no idea* what the code for any of
these programs actually looks like. Occasionally Codex will emit diffs as it makes changes, and skimming these 20 line snippets, it looks like code I'd probably write.

Code exploration is also great. I noticed that amfora does syntax highlighting on preformat blocks, and I wanted to figure out how. I cloned the repo, fired up Codex, and asked it. It found that amfora uses a package called 'chroma', and gave me some pointers on integrating it into my client.

AI is terrifying and great.