Why do this?
Mostly, this is an elaborate yak shave.
The hype around AI has been interminable. I see and hear folks using AI to make their work day easier.
Most of my attempts have been disappointing. Apart from two instances, I wish I had just spent the time learning what I needed to know.
The two instances were:
1. Genearating an SVG. I knew what I wanted it to look like, but I was too lazy to install an svg editor.
2. Generating a bash script to scan through my notes and periodically collect github links and tags. It's a few grep, sed and tr commands, but was still being lazy.
In both those instances, I could easily verify the code and the output, and I didn't want to build the inertia to do it by hand.
I wondered if I could use AI to generate my personal website. It fits the pattern where I can verify correctness easily, and I'm feeling too lazy to write html by hand.
And yes, I'm familiar with Gatsby/Astro/e11eventy, but that is the wrong flavor of yak shave for today.
Which tools?
For editing, I used cursor, and the neovim VSCode extension.
The site generator is written in python because I'm able to understand it.
The content is written in markdown and the site generator turns it into html.
Deployed on cloudflare because it's free.
Lessons learned:
- Make your changes easy to verify.
It's going to spew out convincing code. Set up your dev workflow so that verifiation isn't a pain.
- Prefer 10 small iterations over 1 perfect step.
The temptation is to write a perfect prompt that does everything you want in one go. I found this to be a trap.
- Write psuedocode first.
This is from Pragmatic Programmer, but the LLM workflow also seems to like it.