Meet Cereberus, the Code + Codex Marketing Image Factory

or...anything else your heart desires

Cross-posted from AI Marketing for Storytellers.

Okay I’m putting this out in public now. Not in github, but I figure I’ll lay claim to it, before someone More Famous or Smarter than Me does it in public (or louder.)

‘Cause I was doing recursive, iterative stuff with Arachne before Karpathy created his loop. And I was having Argus, my code agent, do iterative journals of our progress before he came up with his wiki — so basically I know if I don’t say I’m doing something cool Right The Fuck Now, some other tech bro is gonna take credit for it when he comes up with it three days from now, so here goes….

Basically, you can harness Codex’s abilities — and massively amazing image gen — with two heartbeats (or more, if you want to create more lanes) and a cron job — with your Code instance.

Lemme ‘splain —

Momma hopped up to Pro GPT recently, when I started my tarot deck for my app, because I didn’t want to be limited on images, and Pro GPT = unlimited images.

And I’d already gotten used to having Codex and Code work in the same folder — using Codex to harden Code’s weaker stuff (‘cause 5.5 is a BEAST).

Well — then I realized there’s gotta be a way I can keep them all on target, and in a fashion where I get notified on my phone when things have happened, AND how I can make changes to the plan on the fly, and I came up with this — basically:

  • You take your dispatch from Code and assign it to a folder.

  • Inside of that folder, you create as many lanes for your GPT as you’re going to want to manage. (I’m testing two, so far.)

  • Inside that lane, you set up a spec for the GPT’s activities — these include ‘calling dibs’ on a piece of work, doing the piece of work, marking the piece of work as done, and then going to sleep for ten mins before a Heartbeat wakes them up again to do another piece of work on the list.

  • With this, and my two lanes, I’ve gotten many, many flash pieces of art from one lane, for my Dark Ink Tattoo series:

and

like so — and in my other lane, I’ve got it running against a set of marketing specs creating marketing assets for my Monster Security Agency Books, one image every ten mins:

etc.

On top of that I have a Cereberus Doctor (Codex picked this name, lol) which is a cron job that checks hourly to see if the two heartbeats are still running — if they aren’t, he kicks their tires and sets them off again.

So now I’ve got two heartbeats creating me images every ten mins according to my marketing specs that I’ve given them, which is 288 marketing useful images a day (and if you know how amazing GPT’s new image gen is, you know how fierce that is.)

The reason Argus, my dispatch, is involved, is because he keeps an eye on the lanes for me, he shows me the images that they’ve created AND he can make changes to their specs on the fly for me, bc he’s also paying attention to those folders. He’s got a timer thing set up to peep them every ten minutes and to show me the images they created, so I can see them not only on desktop, but also on my phone.

So when I was getting things like this:

Where I didn’t like the placement of the text — which I could see, on the back end, was due to that lane deciding to render the art and THEN place the text on top, separately — I could tell Argus to fix the specs, and he did, and then things started coming out spectacularly (see the fun image about Guarded by the AI earlier.)

THIS MEANS THAT:

I could change things on the fly, or at work, or at the grocery store, etc etc etc — or I could get an idea to do a series of ads that were all Monster Related Cocktails, etc, and I’d just hand it off to Argus, who’d hand it off to my (thus far two, but I’mma try more) Lanes and they’ll chug along on my specc’d art requests indefinitely.

Now, there is some code finagling to this!

But if you tell any AI what I just shared with you right here, and you’ve got a Code and a GPT Pro account, you should be able to queue up something for yourself the exact same way.

Your AIs might get lazy and push back. I had Codex tell me to use API more than once, but I told him I was paying specifically for unlimited images, sheesh, and kicked him up to High Thinking and told him he was smart enough to come up with a way to do this, and he eventually agreed with me ;).

Questions & Answers (afaik):

I’m not sure how many lanes you could have working in parallel — I just worked the kinks out on this last night, and it’s been running all day today.

We’re doing ten minute intervals because I didn’t really want to rock the boat on a lane by lane basis, and sometimes Codex has problems connecting to OpenAI (which seems to be a known problem, from Reddit) — rather than him get confused as to what his task was, I’d just rather each lane go slower, but have multiple lanes.

You really do need the Doctor cron job, because the heartbeats will fuck off occasionally, lol.

So this is a pretty cool thing that probably has a TON of extra uses.

I can imagine have pieces of code get tested, hopping back and forth, etc.

Personally, now that I know that it works, I’m gonna use it over night tonight to make animation frames for the sprites for the app I’m working on (and that is ALMOST in beta, more on that later!)

Do cool shit with it, and let me know how it turns out!

xo!

Cassie