Building a SaaS with Codex

Here’s a proven, modern stack you can ship fast:

• Next.js 16 (App Router) — Frontend + API routes
• TypeScript — Type safety
• Tailwind CSS — Styling
• Neon Postgres — Database and authentication
• Drizzle ORM — Type-safe queries
• Vercel — Hosting and deployments

This stack is developer-friendly, scalable, and works especially well with AI tools.

Start with a small relational core and keep authentication data separate:

create table conversations (
  id uuid primary key,
  owner_user_id uuid not null,
  title text not null,
  visibility text not null default 'private',
  created_at timestamptz default now()
);

Give messages and steps their own tables so chronology stays intact while titles and visibility can be edited independently.

Use Managed Better Auth through @neondatabase/auth. Keep sign-in in server actions, derive the current user from the server session, and never accept an owner ID from the browser.

Treat every user prompt as a new step, attach following assistant messages until the next prompt, and generate a short title deterministically from the first meaningful line.

Run lint, type checking, unit tests, the production build, and inspect the extension manifest. Then deploy a preview and test the full import-to-publish journey.