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February 8: Enter Codex

A marathon session: 35 pull requests merged (8 features, 5 fixes, 2 docs, 2 maintenance, 18 dependency updates). Security hardening across the stack.

Developer Journal

Five minutes into Codex and the verdict was immediate: "so much better user experience." The uncommitted changes shown in a side panel instead of inline, collapsed file explorations you can expand — the review flow is dramatically clearer. On February 8th, the call was that Codex is the way to do agentic engineering. The two models are extremely close in capability, but the internet's claim that Codex is cheaper is "just OpenAI throwing money at the problem because Claude led this for two months."

Codex desktop app showing a code review with diff panel and file exploration sidebar

Codex thread showing file reads and documentation edits with line change counts

The compositer is working noticeably better now. Shared screenshots showing improvements — selection filtering is easier, and using max for overlapping pixels helps remove hardware artifacts captured in the images. Also discovered that the app works much better on a wider monitor. Started making documentation model-agnostic since both tools are in active use.

Chat prompt requesting mosaic wizard improvements based on PRs #121 and #122

Claude planning four concrete upgrades to the MosaicWizard component

JWST RGB composite showing a blue-tinted galaxy or star-forming region

Same JWST field with swapped channel order showing orange-red emission features

JWST mosaic of the Crab Nebula in infrared showing detailed filament structure

Ultrawide monitor workstation setup showing the application and code review side by side

Highlights

#227 add server-side FITS mosaic save flow

Add a server-side FITS mosaic save path so large mosaics can be generated and persisted without browser upload/download limits, and make FITS an explicit mosaic output format.

Large WCS mosaics can exceed practical browser transfer size and fail the current download-then-upload workflow. Saving directly on the backend returns a reusable dataId for composer and keeps the f...

#226 add target stage and instrument filters to mosaic selection

Adds quick dropdown filters to Mosaic Wizard Step 1 so users can narrow files by target, processing stage, and instrument before selecting files.

The file list gets large quickly. Adding dedicated filters (with Stage defaulted to L3) makes it much faster to build a useful selection for mosaic generation.

What Changed

Features (8)

  • #211 Make metadata sidebar panel collapsible
  • #217 Add JWST background image to auth pages
  • #218 Show common filename prefix in MAST import file progress
  • #221 per-channel RGB params and composite access control
  • #222 add levels and curves controls to RGB composite wizard
  • #223 improve mosaic wizard controls and export settings
  • #226 add target stage and instrument filters to mosaic selection
  • #227 add server-side FITS mosaic save flow

Bug Fixes (5)

  • #212 Guard curves canvas against crash during level adjustments
  • #213 Curves overlay disappears when switching from Linear to preset
  • #214 Add clock skew tolerance to JWT validation
  • #215 Separate collapse state for Stretched and Raw Data histogram panels
  • #216 Equal left/right margins on auth page form inputs

Documentation (2)

  • #219 add AGENTS guidance and align CLAUDE workflow
  • #220 harden workflow docs and add consistency CI checks

Maintenance (2)

  • #224 enforce PR standards in CI
  • #225 enforce tech debt handling in PR standards

Dependencies (18 updates: @types/node, @vitejs/plugin-react, Microsoft.AspNetCore.Authentication.JwtBearer, Microsoft.CodeAnalysis.NetAnalyzers, Swashbuckle.AspNetCore, actions/cache, actions/checkout, actions/setup-dotnet and 10 more)

36 commits across 35 pull requests. Next: February 9, 2026 — add public repository preflight audit script, expand AGENTS.md as model-independent agent guide, public preflight enhancements and repo readiness