Engineer builds mother's restaurant terrace with Codex, dodging €20k quotes
gabrielchua · x · 2026-11-03
An OpenAI Academy story: Vienna software engineer Alex Gavrilescu's mother runs a small restaurant, Be Fresh. Quotes for a summer terrace ran €10,000-20,000, so he decided to build it himself with Codex.
He fed Codex the permit's dimension and positioning requirements to explore designs; his mother loved the first one, but it was too hard to build. He then had Codex search Vienna-area stores for actually purchasable materials and regenerate designs around them, letting the family compare budget options — resulting in a design tied to a shopping list with quantities and stores.
Codex also produced what he calls "IKEA style instructions" for cutting and assembling, and helped him work through problems during the build.
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