CodePen 2.0

danielvaughn

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.

jjcm

> 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.

sakjur

If the owner reads this, I'd consider getting codepen.app registered as a public suffix [1]. [1] https://publicsuffix.org/

jackbravo

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?

carloseduardopx

Whoah… CodePen… didn’t remember that… since the overflow of ai tools, this feels a bit like ancient tech. Used to love CodePen.

log101

CodePen is like an HTML/CSS/JS temple. Greate place to explore the limits of what native web offers.

gottagocode

Used to love this site back when you could see what other craftsmen were actually creating by hand.

shimman

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.

mckee_plus_plus

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.

rglover

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.

undershirt

any intersection with val.town use cases?

okzgn

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

wewewedxfgdf

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.

drbioart

this is neat. Thank you.

ianberdin

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.

cognitiveinline

I don't see the ad with the adblock, but the shitty UX popup modal at the bottom will be the death of them.

cesarvarela

So much shit is going on on that homepage. (meaning I found it hard to read and focus)

socalgal2

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.