I'm back...

I’m back

So, I haven’t been writing, not here, and not really anywhere. Part of the reason I’ve not been writing is because I really want to have a positive tone, and I just wasn’t feeling it. Well, I’m going to try to push past that.

Maybe…

But hey, let’s talk about some software.

I originally started this site using Manuel Ernesto Garcia’s excellent template. Over time, I made some modifications. Eventually, Tailwind v4 was released. Getting the dependencies sorted wasn’t fun for me (the template also used DaisyUI, but I didn’t really, having removed some of its value, and it was a bit before DaisyUI was updated for Tailwind v4). I tried the instructions, I did RTFM, honest, but I failed miserably trying to get things upgraded and looking okay. (Funnily enough, I have Renovate running, and through my own neglect, auto-updates had also destroyed my styling. Maybe I should have just gone with my incomplete fixes.)

Well, something had to change. A few months back, I created a branch with the idea of rebuilding the site from scratch. Brilliant! That truly was my intent, but I kept being drawn to other projects. Every time I started thinking about learning enough CSS to make the site what I wanted… well, another project would suddenly be a lot more compelling.

I had actually used updating dependencies on my old site as a test for new LLMs. Admittedly, it had been a while since I’d tried that, but none had succeeded. Well, this time, I didn’t do that. Instead, I started with my branch that was a lot closer to empty and asked GPT-5 to get me the same functionality as my trunk branch (I probably should have a post sometime about why I call my main branch trunk, and why you should, too) with minimal dependencies. Okay, this isn’t quite what it created the first time, but the first time was so close that it was worth continuing in that vein. The codebase now uses a regular script tag, not SolidJS (still excellent), to inject comments. I was also able to get rid of DaisyUI (also, still excellent). In both cases, I was not using the dependencies in a way that brought meaningful value, and they were simply more dependencies to keep up to date.

Listen, I did review the code, had the LLM talk me through some of it, and looked some things up. I’m pretty confident I could have done it all by hand, but now I don’t have to. I even dealt with some things I’d been kicking the can on. For example, I had a script for generating og:image files for posts, for LinkedIn, but I didn’t have it wired in. Now, it’s done as part of the Cloudflare build process using raw Node (I’d originally used TypeScript because types).

I know some of you hate vibe coding, or anything AI. I get it. I’ve gone back and forth myself. I continue to go back and forth. I can make good, strong arguments for both sides. Right now, I keep coming back to using the models and the tools. I do think they’re getting better. I also think they let me do more, faster.