10+ Things You Should Build With AI Instead of Sending Files

The episode is prompted by OpenAI's launch of 'Sites' within Codex, a feature that simplifies publishing AI-built projects as shareable web apps. The host uses this as a jumping-off point to argue that the website is emerging as a new canonical artifact in the knowledge worker's toolkit, replacing the legacy formats — decks, PDFs, spreadsheets, and email threads — that have long dominated professional communication.

The host identifies roughly a dozen core problems with traditional downloadable file formats that websites solve. These include the versioning and currency problem (files go stale the moment they are sent), distribution friction (attachments require compatible software and create clutter), navigation constraints (docs are linear, spreadsheets are tabular, PDFs are paged), context fragmentation (information spread across multiple documents), the passive nature of documents (recipients cannot interact), audience fit (documents flatten diverse readers into one average reader), lack of native actionability, poor reusability, absence of engagement observability, presentation limitations, access control challenges, and brittleness in an agent-driven future where Cloudflare has already reported that bot/agent browsing surpasses human browsing.

The host then walks through 18 specific knowledge work artifacts that are strong candidates for conversion into websites. These range from the obvious — slide decks becoming narrative websites, strategy memos becoming strategy sites, research reports becoming research hubs — to the more nuanced, such as spreadsheets becoming data sites with guided dashboards, sales proposals becoming interactive microsites with toggleable pricing, and client updates becoming living client portals. Other examples include project briefs becoming project homepages, case studies becoming interactive case pages, competitive analyses becoming continuously updated intelligence hubs (potentially fed by agents), static training materials becoming dynamic learning sites, employee handbooks becoming living interactive resources, board materials becoming structured portals, investor updates becoming real-time investor pages, job descriptions becoming candidate experience sites, brand guidelines becoming brand system sites, and media kits becoming press sites.

The host notes several recurring patterns across these use cases: artifacts that get forwarded around committees without the creator present, artifacts that keep evolving after they are nominally 'finished,' and artifacts whose content is scattered across multiple channels. The episode closes with the observation that much of the current explosion in vibe coding is simply knowledge workers discovering that websites are better information-sharing vehicles than the legacy formats they inherited, and that platform-level features like Codex Sites will only accelerate this shift.