Ben's Bites builds UK council spending 'Apple Maps' from 107M rows using 656 Codex subagents
Ben's Bites · rss · 2026-09-04
Ben's Bites documents a large agent-driven build: scraping 107 million rows of English council spending data and turning it into an Apple Maps-style visualization site, soon to be open-sourced.
Headline stats: 8.2B tokens, 235 messages, 656 subagents, 2 days of continuous Codex runs across 552 threads, covering 319 of 339 councils.
Key techniques:
- Codex /goal loop with subagent delegation: 3 parallel subagents catalogued 31 official sources; every download checksummed
- Parquet + DuckDB on a Mac Mini for big-data storage/query
- Rapid prototyping with mock data; multiple agents run the same prompt in parallel; published via here.now for instant clickable prototypes
- Data cleaning: 4 subagents classified 2,000 unknown vendors; Tesco merged from 6 name variants; discovered a hidden £5m threshold filter from the static-site design
- Review loop: voice notes + screenshots in, itemized checklists out, yes/no replies
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