CodePen 2.0 • Hacker News Board

Re: CodePen 2.0

#21

Post by ethanpil » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

jackbravo wrote: post #5

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?

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.

Re: CodePen 2.0

#22

Post by SquareWheel » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

SahAssar wrote: post #20

jjcm wrote: post #3

> 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.

> Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point. Have github pages done this? Has cloudflare pages?

I would imagine that both companies have extensive internal tooling to address this concern; likely at multiple levels.

Re: CodePen 2.0

#23

Post by okzgn » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

What you can do with it: https://blog.codepen.io/2026/07/23/two-point-oh/#what-can-it...

Re: CodePen 2.0

#24

Post by wewewedxfgdf » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC

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.

Re: CodePen 2.0

#25

Post by anamexis » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 9:59 PM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #22

SahAssar wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any free hosting solution tends to spiral towards abuse at some point. Have github pages done this? Has cloudflare pages?

I would imagine that both companies have extensive internal tooling to address this concern; likely at multiple levels.

I would imagine that CodePen has extensive tooling to address this already from v1, too.

Re: CodePen 2.0

#26

Post by drbioart » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

this is neat. Thank you.

Re: CodePen 2.0

#27

Post by echelon » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 10:28 PM UTC

danielvaughn wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Re: CodePen 2.0

#28

Post by TimTheTinker » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

micromacrofoot wrote: post #19

bodhi_mind wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solvable with reasonable defaults and putting most things behind an advanced section?

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

> it's just not solvable

Watch out, good hackers find those words incredibly motivating.

Re: CodePen 2.0

#29

Post by hazelnut » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:07 PM UTC

wewewedxfgdf wrote: post #24

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.

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.

Source: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codepen&date=all&geo=Wor...

Re: CodePen 2.0

#30

Post by hazelnut » Thu, Jul 30, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

jackbravo wrote: post #5

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?

Used JSFiddle years ago too. I barely touch these anymore. Google Trends shows JSFiddle lost the fight: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=codepen%2CJSFiddle&date=...