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the app desktop and on phone
Inspiration
I have a dog named Chloe whom I adopted from Brooklyn shelter in New York City. I work at catering as a bartender and server. Sometimes long hours. I have a simple webcam to look at Chloe during breaks at work. Their free service is full of ads. Every time I open I have to watch ads over a minute or more of add and usually can't find the X button. I had been wondering for last 4 years would it be possible if I can put a camera in my room grab the video and somehow watch it on my phone when I am away. I didn't know how.
On 17th I received the Codex Dev email. There was a picture with Codex Build Week in it. I checked out, oh! they are giving money out too! I could use some money, I could go to India and see my mom. I haven't been for a while. In the movie Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth tells the story of a guy who keeps praying "Let me win a lottery, let me win a lottery..." Finally God got fed up and appeared and says "bro, take a f'ing lottery". So I thought let me take the lottery at least.
This is a humble app idea. I can imagine all the amazing things all wonderful people around the world would submit. But I am truly blown away how gpt-5.6.sol-medium put it all together. My experience was like watching one of those hacker movies where the leading girl hacks magic on her screen. It was inspiring. A moment of wonder. Ha!
What it does
There is a small cam in my room. A program running on my computer grabs the video. Sends the video to an amazon Linux system which streams it using Namecheap for Domain/DNS management. I can see Chloe live at my website.
How we built it
I tested if I can use the camera api to grab the video from the camera. I was able to stream the video using ffplay on my computer. I discussed with Sol that I want to build an app and what I want to achieve. Based that Sol gave me a 7 step architecture how to go about it. I wrote down those 7 steps in a file. Then I re-prompted with STEP I sections and asked to tell me how you are going to achieve before starting to work. So Sol gave me a list of proposed steps for STEP 1. I went through them. Asked Sol to start working. Once a step is successfully done if there are something I can check like say the video locally, I did that. Repeated the process.
Challenges we ran into
I struggled a bit in the beginning to figure out how to stream rtsp stream from the camera using ffplay. Sol achieved objectives of a every step without much failure. If an error happens, fixed them automatically and kept on the work. One of the things Sol kept checking was that credentials are not exposed anywhere even in error logs or anywhere. One of the things I needed to do was create 3 subdomains on my website. Luckily it went well.
I haven't used Sol much, so I kept worrying I'll run out of my credits. But I have plenty left.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Finishing every step felt great - building local camera agent, creating a streaming server on amazon ec2, building the web app. It was amazing to see Sol finally removing ssh root access on ec2, kept a side login open in case we locked out, also updating the Ubuntu server and restarting the server and so on.
Finally when I saw the video streaming on my website, it was like I wrapped my mouth in wonder!
What we learned
Even though the project sounds simple it isn't really that simple. There are a lot of things that could have been difficult to trouble shoot. One thing why it was successful was and was able to finish it in a short time was that Sol give me a full plan in the beginning and I fed it back step by step. I did it unconsciously but it worked. I am inspired to realize more ideas.
What's next for Watch My Dog
The camera is a bit old, used camera lying in my room. Our longer test >30 min it freezes. I could get a better camera and also add features like motion detection. Sol has done security auditing and make sure that ports are not exposed and uses TLS and other checks. I believe, it is important do a thorough security analysis in a different Codex session.
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