Hands-on website creation with AI: building a website from start to finish

We looked at Lovable and Codex CLI with GitHub Pages and tried to spend as much time as possible on practical issues.

Main takeaways:

1. The session had good energy. We set up several versions of the same website in parallel based on Tanya's project presentation. Here are the results:

- mine with Lovable: https://limmud-alternative.lovable.app

- Tanya's with Lovable: https://limud-portal-me.lovable.app

- mine with Codex CLI and GitHub Pages: https://ikotelnikov.github.io/new-site

2. I prepared a short instruction with just five steps on how to get a similar result with Lovable if you need a website and do not really understand how to build one yet. I made it especially concrete and simple for people who feel intimidated by all this: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17v06QIA0ujOU5FIm-gyMKqMUTtnQ3fewcdjPFtrvkYo

3. Personally, I prefer building websites in Codex CLI and publishing them on GitHub Pages. That way, changes are generated within the shared Codex token budget, and overall I find the approach more flexible.

4. At the meetup, however, we found that Codex CLI is still not as easy for complete beginners as I initially thought. You have to know how to open a terminal, and before installing Codex you need to figure out how to install npm. After Codex CLI is installed you can perform any additional setup through it, but getting it installed and launched still requires motivation.

5. In general, I keep encouraging everyone to try building their first website, even if it is just with Lovable, and see how simple it has become. And if something gets hard, ask questions in the Free Chat.