It all started with scaffolding
Yesterday I met my friend Anna at Oldtimer, at Dubai Autodrome. We had no technical brief, development team or month-long roadmap. There was only a real business question: how to find events in the industrial information noise that could turn into orders for scaffolding, industrial services and contract work.
For example:
a refinery repair, turnaround, shutdown, unit upgrade, construction of a new facility, EPC contractor selection or a tender.
So the news itself was not what interested us. The question was: Where might this news create money for a contractor?
First, we built the brain — not the website
First I created a dedicated project in ChatGPT. We started defining what the system should look for, which events count as commercial signals, which sources to use and what data to extract from every publication.
That gave us a structure:
Here, ChatGPT was not a text generator but more a blend of research analyst, product manager and data architect.
In parallel, we assembled the first set of real signals and prepared the project’s initial brief.
Then Codex joined the work
Once the domain logic was in place, we handed the project to Codex. That was the second part of the process.
Codex received something much richer than an abstract “build me a website”: a data structure, the product’s purpose, the primary materials and an understanding of how the feed should work.
The result was a complete web product:
Codex built the interface, filters, responsive version, signal structure, checks and deployment pipeline. Before long, the project had a production URL:
What we had after two hours
The first version of PromPulse contains 25 qualified signals from 20 sources: media outlets, industry publications, corporate documents and tender platforms.
But the main value is not the number of links. Each card tries to answer a practical question:
A routine notice about a unit repair tells you very little on its own. But once we understand the asset, the likely shutdown window and the nature of the work, we can start looking ahead for the tender, contractor or procurement activity.
This is not quite a news site
I would not call PromPulse a news aggregator at all. Its purpose is the opposite: not to show people more news, but to remove the news that carries no commercial meaning.
Ideally, the system turns a stream of industry information into a short list: who is worth calling, which asset is worth watching, and where a contract may emerge in a few months.
And it is not quite vibe coding
The most interesting thing about the whole story is not even how quickly the code was written.
Today, vibe coding is often reduced to a formula: write a prompt → AI writes an app.
Our process looked a little different:
- Anna brought the domain context.
- We shaped the product.
- ChatGPT researched and structured.
- Codex built and deployed.
For a few hours, a small virtual team appeared around one café table.
For now, it is only version 0.1
For the moment, the project’s “memory” lives in a transparent, typed database inside Git, and new signals are collected manually.
But the next stage is already clear:
Collectors will visit the sources several times a day; new events will be verified, deduplicated and scored; the most interesting signals will land in a permanent database.
Then PromPulse will no longer answer only:
“What happened in industry today?”
It will answer the far more useful question:
“Where is an opportunity to make money appearing for an industrial contractor right now — and what will happen next?”
Two hours are a new unit of measurement
The strangest feeling came after the meeting. Only a few years ago, an idea like this would have meant several meetings, a technical brief, a designer, a frontend developer, a backend developer and weeks of work just to reach the first version.
Yesterday we simply ordered coffee. Two hours later, we had a working product.
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