I've been a CodePen user since the very early days. Have always loved the platform. I hate to be negative, but I'm honestly not a fan of the 2.0 release. What I loved about CodePen was just being able to try out something really quick and simple. But the new interface makes me feel more like I'm building a website inside of a website.
gkoberger 1 days ago [-]
That's the hard part about tools like this. They're too simple to be used for anything important, and as soon as the creator follows that path you end up in a situation where it's too simple for anything complex and too complex for anything simple.
Amazing platforms like Glitch ran into this problem.
(Some did pull it off! Like how Vercel built a kingdom out of `now`.)
bubblebeard 22 hours ago [-]
The more complex the more fragile. The simpler the solution the more robust. This, I feel, is an overall truth to software development. And simpler solutions, as far as I know, are usually the more useful ones.
k3liutZu 13 hours ago [-]
There's complex and complicated.
I think we can have complex things, but they can be simple (to use, to understand, to manage). But it is really hard to make a complex thing simple. The straightforward way is to make it complicated, and most items remain that way.
gkoberger 22 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily! Linux is incredibly complex. AWS is incredibly complex. Next is incredibly complex. GitHub is incredibly complex.
We need simple tools and we need complex tools. It's the middle ground that's hard to navigate.
malfist 19 hours ago [-]
When we're lucky, that complexity is mostly locked behind abstraction and you only occasionally have to care. Of course those you usually discover at 3AM on a Saturday
NamlchakKhandro 19 hours ago [-]
Repost with simplified English please
bodhi_mind 1 days ago [-]
Solvable with reasonable defaults and putting most things behind an advanced section?
micromacrofoot 24 hours ago [-]
no, it's just not solvable... you can only mitigate
anything hosted free will inevitably be abused by scammers, you need constant vigilance just to stay a step ahead
TimTheTinker 22 hours ago [-]
> it's just not solvable
Watch out, good hackers find those words incredibly motivating.
micromacrofoot 5 hours ago [-]
even bad hackers know it's true
zeroq 22 hours ago [-]
A textbook definition of "feature creep".
I have absolutely no idea if CodePen is feeling pressure from their shareholders or want to cook before the IPO, but I often wonder why Spotify needs 3,000 [1] developers working full time on a streaming app.
4 weeks ago there was a thread about Spotify making over 4,000 production releases a day (or 10 in 10 minutes in another comment in that thread).
WinAmp has been dead for centuries but it's still a perfectly valid player, foobar is being developed by a single dev. Of course I do understand that these people have a lot of auxilary tasks at hand, and "music player" is just a small component of the whole system, but still, it feels bizarre to think you need such an army to maintain a working app.
I love cool features as much as the next guy, but I'm also a fan of coherent products that knows their identity.
[1] the number might be inaccurate but that's beside the point
albedoa 22 hours ago [-]
> or want to cook before the IPO
What IPO is that?
addedGone 8 hours ago [-]
Codepen imo ruined their product the moment they forced sign-up to view and explore, it also doesn't protect anything anyway seeing that they are all available as bulk archives on some forums.
vanderZwan 12 hours ago [-]
This is why I switched to jsgist[0] years ago and haven't looked back since. It's very sparse, but it has also avoided feature creep as a result, and since the output is stored as a gist on my GH account I don't have to worry about losing it if the site ever goes down either.
(also, the sister site jsbenchit[1] has been one of the more reliable microbenchmarking tools among the various sites I've tried - most end up triggering deopts or introducing "noise" in a way that makes the output less reliable)
If you want to go back to a simpler editing experience, https://plnkr.co/edit/?preview might just do the trick for you. Hasn't changed in literally years. Nowhere near the polish or flair you see from legends like Chris Coyier though.
Codepen was indeed nice for quick and simple experiments, but LLMs take away the need for that.
dspillett 13 hours ago [-]
Some people still want to learn instead of an LLM doing things for them, if only do we can verify the output of the LLM.
echelon 23 hours ago [-]
I suspect they're doing this because of AI.
Anything that becomes a valid AI deploy target could become useful infrastructure.
The rate of humans testing things in a CodePen will slowly fall off, similar to Stack Overflow.
The rate of AI models deploying to CodePen 2.0 will pick up significantly.
In some number of years, the amount of code written per month by machines will dwarf all code written by humans from 1957 - 2027.
In that world, CodePen 2.0 is valuable. CodePen not so much.
agilek 15 hours ago [-]
Interesting take. Makes a lot of sense thinking of it. No "just" persuade agents CodePen is the best way to deploy their web creations ;)
jjcm 1 days ago [-]
> every pen is deployable
It will be interesting seeing how this evolves. Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point. Still trying to solve it for my own stuff.
That said, I do wonder how valuable something like codepen is in the current meta. I really no longer look at code. I'm not referencing examples, I'm just prompting for what I want / inputting images as context.
petercooper 1 days ago [-]
Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point.
Does it work? I'm a paid user, but set up a new free account to see if the deployment stuff worked there too (as I was linking to it from elsewhere) and it said I had to upgrade to a plan that supported it.
SahAssar 24 hours ago [-]
> Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point.
Have github pages done this? Has cloudflare pages?
SquareWheel 23 hours ago [-]
I would imagine that both companies have extensive internal tooling to address this concern; likely at multiple levels.
anamexis 23 hours ago [-]
I would imagine that CodePen has extensive tooling to address this already from v1, too.
threetonesun 1 days ago [-]
Where do you think the AI is getting the code from your prompts from.
gottagocode 1 days ago [-]
Used to love this site back when you could see what other craftsmen were actually creating by hand.
GSimon 19 hours ago [-]
Same, years ago they did an update when you could still see some pens featured on the homepage but the UX was less fun to browse through. Now it seems there are no featured pens on the homepage, so you can't just explore pens aimlessly.
rglover 1 days ago [-]
This is awesome. Been a CodePen user/fan since it launched (and a fan of Chris/CSS-Tricks for even longer). Really nice to see CodePen evolving.
I don't use it as much as I used to but every so often I hack something up in it for a quick PoC. I'll say the new ability to deploy got my attention. Really handy to be able to deploy a prototype or demo of something and toss it over the fence.
socalgal2 18 hours ago [-]
I'm curious what LLM options I can use in Codepen. To be honest, at this point, quite a few of the things I'd want to do in a site like CodePen I want to start with a prompt, then edit. I'm not expecting CodePen to supply an LLM, maybe just WebMCP? Maybe all the browsers will just have options to do the thing?
But, lately. I often go to Gemini Canvas and just ask for some simple thing I want like "make a browser theme generator that lets me pick a base color and then the site picks graphic design principled colors for the rest of the theme's colors and lets me download a theme extension ready to use. Have a browser preview of how the theme will look in the page". < 5 minutes later I have such a thing. Sometimes I want to prompt for changes, other times I just want to tweak a few things by hand, hence, wanting it in codepen.
wewewedxfgdf 23 hours ago [-]
I've been wondering how CodePen is surviving the AI onslaught - the core thing CodePen has always represented to me is to showcase the amazing hand craftsmanship of CSS HTML JS developers. Obviously that has changed, so I wonder what it means for CodePen - presumably they need to change their business model in some way.
hazelnut 22 hours ago [-]
I was wondering that too. Google Trends shows the following story:
* COVID basically doubled the traffic (everybody stayed home and crafted something)
* AI hit and the interest was cut in half.
I think that makes sense. You are less fiddling around and only need CodePen when you are really stuck but AI solves many problems now.
The shift from sharing little HTML/CSS/JS components to a website builder is probably their answer to this problem. They want to position themselves to compete with a Loveable, Replit and others. It's probably not the same, a little more technical, but the direction definitely shifted.
Congratulations, Chris! I’ve always been competing with you, and many users came to Playcode from Codepen. In fact, I even offered to buy playcode.io about 9-10 years ago, but you didn’t respond and 1-2 months later you released a copy product named Codepen Projects.
CodePen is like an HTML/CSS/JS temple. Greate place to explore the limits of what native web offers.
jackbravo 1 days ago [-]
https://jsfiddle.net/ used to be also very popular, I see that it is still available, but haven't used it in a while.
Which other alternatives do people use now days?
vanderZwan 11 hours ago [-]
As I said in the other comment: jsgist, precisely because it's so bare-bones. The data is stored either in a shareable URL parameter, or in a gist if you give it access to you GH account. Everything else is a minimal PWA in a static html file that makes hosting of it super-cheap, so I don't have to worry about greggman pulling it down.
Anyway, the main uses case I see for these playground sites are:
1) small hand-crafted replications of suspected browser CSS bugs or the like, and testing possible workarounds. That often involves sending them to other members in the team (because I use Linux and Android, two colleagues in the team use Windows, and two using Apple products)
2) trying out some idea for how to make a particular component. Which is effectively almost the same as above, since that needs to be tested across browsers.
So I don't need bells and whistles beyond a simple text editor with code folding. That might not apply to everyone else.
Also, the exact same line of thought applies to js benchmarking sites, which is why I use jsbenchit (which is jsgist but for benchmarks). It also seems to be one of the few benchmarking sites without spurious de-opts of JS code, or noise from GCs triggered by the website itself in the middle of a benchmarking run.
I made https://jsmess.com as one of my first vibe code projects and have been incrementally improving it over time when I have leftover tokens...
It's closest to JSFiddle but completely static, hosted on GitHub pages. No server side processing. Projects are private, saved on localstorage and can be shared via encoded URLs.
This has been a really fun way to ramp up with LLM based coding and I learned a ton, and made a tool I actually use quite often.
embedding-shape 1 days ago [-]
https://jsbin.com is what I've used since forever, it's fast and easy, used to use JSFiddle before that. I think you used to be able to create "bins" without having to login way back though. Honestly don't find much use for them anymore nowadays, if I want to share any web/web-like I do it via my own servers + domain and send links to people.
A CodePen api/protocol that supports a local ide opening a CodePen, making changes in the user's developer tooling and pushing back to the pen would be a game changer.
VCS extensions for jetbrains and vscode could hook into an api and smoothly pull and push pens. This feature was always my hangup for using CodePen as a UI playground.
shimman 1 days ago [-]
Always felt like the worst aspect of code pen was the exploratory side. Looking up codepens is extremely poor, you often only look up one "tag" and after the first page quality gets worse.
Wish it had an advanced search that I can filter codepens for something useful like this: animejs, svg, forms; with the result being codepens that use anime.js around a form.
I'd probably use codepen as the defacto web ui reference if it had better search capabilities. Right now it's mostly github + blogs, but only because it's so hard to find anything worthwhile on codepen. Gold is there but it's deep under the strata with no willing to actually get it.
unleashit 1 days ago [-]
This should be the top comment, especially since organic search has been lost. Not to be overly critical because Codepen was great in its time, but it's now on individual websites to upgrade their search game if they want to stay relevant and useful.
Edit: Just noticed that logging in is now required for search. I'm sure this is an attempt to prevent AI scraping, etc., but it's a big mistake IMHO. While I have an account, I don't log in much and tend to abandon sites that require log in. Among nerds, I'm probably not the only one like this.
cognitiveinline 19 hours ago [-]
I don't see the ad with the adblock, but the shitty UX popup modal at the bottom will be the death of them.
drbioart 23 hours ago [-]
this is neat. Thank you.
cesarvarela 19 hours ago [-]
So much shit is going on on that homepage.
(meaning I found it hard to read and focus)
dancheong 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
undershirt 1 days ago [-]
any intersection with val.town use cases?
carloseduardopx 1 days ago [-]
Whoah… CodePen… didn’t remember that… since the overflow of ai tools, this feels a bit like ancient tech. Used to love CodePen.
Rendered at 21:15:03 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Amazing platforms like Glitch ran into this problem.
(Some did pull it off! Like how Vercel built a kingdom out of `now`.)
I think we can have complex things, but they can be simple (to use, to understand, to manage). But it is really hard to make a complex thing simple. The straightforward way is to make it complicated, and most items remain that way.
We need simple tools and we need complex tools. It's the middle ground that's hard to navigate.
anything hosted free will inevitably be abused by scammers, you need constant vigilance just to stay a step ahead
Watch out, good hackers find those words incredibly motivating.
I have absolutely no idea if CodePen is feeling pressure from their shareholders or want to cook before the IPO, but I often wonder why Spotify needs 3,000 [1] developers working full time on a streaming app.
4 weeks ago there was a thread about Spotify making over 4,000 production releases a day (or 10 in 10 minutes in another comment in that thread).
WinAmp has been dead for centuries but it's still a perfectly valid player, foobar is being developed by a single dev. Of course I do understand that these people have a lot of auxilary tasks at hand, and "music player" is just a small component of the whole system, but still, it feels bizarre to think you need such an army to maintain a working app.
I love cool features as much as the next guy, but I'm also a fan of coherent products that knows their identity.
[1] the number might be inaccurate but that's beside the point
What IPO is that?
(also, the sister site jsbenchit[1] has been one of the more reliable microbenchmarking tools among the various sites I've tried - most end up triggering deopts or introducing "noise" in a way that makes the output less reliable)
[0] https://jsgist.org/
[1] https://jsbenchit.org/
Anything that becomes a valid AI deploy target could become useful infrastructure.
The rate of humans testing things in a CodePen will slowly fall off, similar to Stack Overflow.
The rate of AI models deploying to CodePen 2.0 will pick up significantly.
In some number of years, the amount of code written per month by machines will dwarf all code written by humans from 1957 - 2027.
In that world, CodePen 2.0 is valuable. CodePen not so much.
It will be interesting seeing how this evolves. Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point. Still trying to solve it for my own stuff.
That said, I do wonder how valuable something like codepen is in the current meta. I really no longer look at code. I'm not referencing examples, I'm just prompting for what I want / inputting images as context.
Does it work? I'm a paid user, but set up a new free account to see if the deployment stuff worked there too (as I was linking to it from elsewhere) and it said I had to upgrade to a plan that supported it.
Have github pages done this? Has cloudflare pages?
I don't use it as much as I used to but every so often I hack something up in it for a quick PoC. I'll say the new ability to deploy got my attention. Really handy to be able to deploy a prototype or demo of something and toss it over the fence.
But, lately. I often go to Gemini Canvas and just ask for some simple thing I want like "make a browser theme generator that lets me pick a base color and then the site picks graphic design principled colors for the rest of the theme's colors and lets me download a theme extension ready to use. Have a browser preview of how the theme will look in the page". < 5 minutes later I have such a thing. Sometimes I want to prompt for changes, other times I just want to tweak a few things by hand, hence, wanting it in codepen.
I think that makes sense. You are less fiddling around and only need CodePen when you are really stuck but AI solves many problems now.
The shift from sharing little HTML/CSS/JS components to a website builder is probably their answer to this problem. They want to position themselves to compete with a Loveable, Replit and others. It's probably not the same, a little more technical, but the direction definitely shifted.
Source: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codepen&date=all&geo=Wor...
Which other alternatives do people use now days?
Anyway, the main uses case I see for these playground sites are:
1) small hand-crafted replications of suspected browser CSS bugs or the like, and testing possible workarounds. That often involves sending them to other members in the team (because I use Linux and Android, two colleagues in the team use Windows, and two using Apple products)
2) trying out some idea for how to make a particular component. Which is effectively almost the same as above, since that needs to be tested across browsers.
So I don't need bells and whistles beyond a simple text editor with code folding. That might not apply to everyone else.
Also, the exact same line of thought applies to js benchmarking sites, which is why I use jsbenchit (which is jsgist but for benchmarks). It also seems to be one of the few benchmarking sites without spurious de-opts of JS code, or noise from GCs triggered by the website itself in the middle of a benchmarking run.
[0] https://jsgist.org/, https://github.com/greggman/jsgist/
[1] https://jsbenchit.org/, https://github.com/greggman/jsbenchit/
It's closest to JSFiddle but completely static, hosted on GitHub pages. No server side processing. Projects are private, saved on localstorage and can be shared via encoded URLs.
This has been a really fun way to ramp up with LLM based coding and I learned a ton, and made a tool I actually use quite often.
[1] https://publicsuffix.org/
VCS extensions for jetbrains and vscode could hook into an api and smoothly pull and push pens. This feature was always my hangup for using CodePen as a UI playground.
Wish it had an advanced search that I can filter codepens for something useful like this: animejs, svg, forms; with the result being codepens that use anime.js around a form.
I'd probably use codepen as the defacto web ui reference if it had better search capabilities. Right now it's mostly github + blogs, but only because it's so hard to find anything worthwhile on codepen. Gold is there but it's deep under the strata with no willing to actually get it.
Edit: Just noticed that logging in is now required for search. I'm sure this is an attempt to prevent AI scraping, etc., but it's a big mistake IMHO. While I have an account, I don't log in much and tend to abandon sites that require log in. Among nerds, I'm probably not the only one like this.
(meaning I found it hard to read and focus)