Where to start when integrating Codex into an existing project?

Codex Codex CLI
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Hi everyone,

I’m Jerry. I’m a first-semester computer science student and I’ve been building a Finnish website https://sahkotanaan.fi/. It tracks electricity prices and features a live data dashboard with some interactive calculators.

Up until now, I’ve been building this without any AI assistance. It’s been a massive learning curve—I’m learning core concepts like Javascript in my classes, but tackling a live web dashboard with real-time API integrations, and state management is a completely different beast.

I’ve gotten the project off the ground manually, but as the architecture gets more complex, I’m looking to start integrating Codex into my workflow to help scale the site and optimize the code. Since I’m new to using AI for actual production code, I wanted to open up a discussion to see how you all handle this:

  • For those building dashboards with live, fluctuating data, how do you prompt Codex to help with the underlying architecture and data fetching?
  • Do you find it more reliable to write the core data-handling logic yourself and use Codex strictly for UI components, or the other way around?
  • Any tips for a student on using Codex to learn best practices, rather than just using it to copy-paste functional but messy code?

I’d love to hear about your workflows and how you balance manual coding with AI generation, especially on data-heavy projects.

Thanks in advance!

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Long answer short.

Learning to use Codex and expecting all your coding problems will be solved is wishful thinking. The one thing that Codex can make a difference for you in the short term is to offer you ideas on how to get past a critical problem and offer up some code examples.

My suggestion is that when prompting for such consider including in the prompt

  1. “You are an expert …” (You need to supply a title or such for …)
  2. “Provide industry best practices.”
  3. “Offer options with the pros and cons.”
  4. “Provide code examples.”
  5. “Please explain for a college student taking their first programming course”

HTH

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