(Maybe) The First Collaborative Website UI Built Specifically for ChatGPT Agent Mode

How a one‑hour weekend hack produced an ultra‑light, multi‑agent workspace for molecular discovery

tl;dr **ci.doi.bio pairs a familiar real‑time chat stream with an always‑visible protein‑structure viewer, then hands the keys to ChatGPT’s brand‑new Agent Mode** so humans and agents can manipulate science data side‑by‑side. It runs on a single T3‑micro instance, needs no GPU, and was live within an hour. Try it, break it, dream up new workflows — and, if you love the vision, let’s talk.

1. The 15‑Minute News Cycle: ChatGPT Announces Agent Mode

Late Friday evening OpenAI quietly shipped Agent Mode — a blended successor to “Operator” and “Deep Research” that empowers GPT‑4o to operate tools, traverse the web, and string together multi‑step plans autonomously. I couldn’t help but think that it would be super cool to have a collaborative website with the work I’m doing with macromolecules.

Enter my Sunday.

I’ve loved the field of Computer‑Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) — ever since Prof. Margaret‑Anne Storey’s amazing graduate seminar at the University of Victoria. Slack, Discord and Notion are direct descendants of those early CSCW experiments. Agent Mode, however, empowers the next notch up: a place where many people and many AI agents act in concert around the same artefacts.

So I forked my main ai.doi.bio website code, got some hot water, and started vibe coding.

2. Meet ci.doi.bio

c**i.doi.bio**

Left Pane : 🗨️ One‑room chat — think “#general” in Discord.Every human and every agent sees the same scroll.

Right Pane : 🧬 Live molecular viewer embedded via WebGL.Anything you load appears instantly for everyone.

The Only Command You Need

Type:

load 1erm

…hit Enter, and the viewer fetches PDB ID 1ERM (or any valid ID). Stack as many structures as you like; a browser refresh clears the slate.

That’s it. No slash‑commands. No saved history. Pure ephemerality — perfect for fast ideation or teaching sessions.

3. Why Agents Change the Game

1. Automation at Human Speed While you chat, an GPT‑4o agent can search RCSB, pick the “sweet‑spot” structure, post the load command, and press Enter—all visible in the same stream.
2. Many Minds, Many Modalities Drug discovery spans chemists, structural biologists, ML engineers, and now AI copilots. A single pane of glass keeps context stable while expertise collides productively.
3. Ultra‑Light Infrastructure No Hugging Face Space, no Kubernetes — just a Node server on AWS t3.micro, relaying WebSocket messages. All the heavy lifting lives in the browser and in ChatGPT’s cloud.

4. Building It in an Hour: Anatomy of a Speed‑Run

One single prompt to change the old codebase from an AI chat to a Discord server experience. There were a couple glitches that Claude Code fixed very easily. Then a super quick deploy to my t3.micro instance.

Total: ≈ 60 minutes of joyful flow.

5. Roadmap (a.k.a. “Stuff I’ll Ship if You Sponsor Lunch”)

• Room Persistence & History Pin breakthroughs; replay agent reasoning.
• Presence & Typing Indicators Know when experts (or bots) are active.
• Granular Agent Channels Private DMs for sensitive IP, public rooms for open science.
• Custom Viewers Swap the protein canvas for NMR spectra, cryo‑EM density, or Jupyter widgets.
• Observability Hooks Firehose of structured events for downstream ELK/Grafana dashboards.
• MCP Server.

6. Why This Matters Beyond Proteins

Think bigger than PDB. Any representable artefact — graphs, legal contracts, design mock‑ups — can sit in the right pane while humans + agents debate on the left. We are inching toward augmented collective intelligence where “chat” is the control plane and specialized canvases are the data plane.

CSCW dreamed it; Agent Mode operationalizes it.

7. Call to Action

1. Kick the Tires Open ci.doi.bio in two browser tabs (or invite a friend) and watch the magic.
2. Bring Your Own Agent Log in with your OpenAI account, enable Agent Mode, and point it towards https://ci.doi.bio with a prompt like “type load 1erm into the text box on https://ci.doi.bio and press enter” let your GPT‑4o alter the session live.
3. Imagine Your Workflow How would your domain look with a shared artefact viewer? Ping me; prototypes want friends.
4. Invest / Collaborate / Acquire I’m seeking partners who feel the urgency of real‑time, agent‑augmented collaboration. If this sparks ideas — let’s talk.

8. Credits & Gratitude

• OpenAI for launching Agent Mode at precisely the right moment.
• Professor Margaret‑Anne Storey and the CSCW community for the intellectual foundation.
• Countless OSS authors whose libraries made “one‑hour MVP” a reality.

Epilogue: The Weekend That Stretched the Future

What began as a whim is now a living laboratory where humans and AIs co‑create in real time. I have a hunch you’ll look back on tools like **ci.doi.bio* as the “Google Docs moment” for scientific computing — so simple it feels obvious after* you’ve tried it.

See you in the chat pane. I’ll be the one typing load 6vxx while my agent fetches the next target.

Steven Randolph Ness Founder, **doi.bio** | Structural Biochemist | Lifelong CSCW Nerd

P.S. Yes, my DMs are open.