PART1: Claude is 1,000 9th graders who have memorized StackOverflow

I have been using AI to write code for about 2 weeks. It is eye-opening to say the least. I'm pretty late to this party and spent a lot of time hating on AI usage. It felt greasy at first. Probably like the first Luddite who went from weaving by hand, to using a loom felt. I bet he was disgusted at himself. I felt pity for people using AI to write code at first. I love writing code. Why would I let the machine take that away from me?

My previous job was at a massive company, on a core piece of infrastructure. If the service went down, hacker news would be filled with people commenting about why every other site on internet was down, raging about why us-east-1 is broken again, and telling other people to touch grass.

When the consequences of a fuckup global and internet scale, they're not using AI to shit out code, commit with the comment "YOLO", and push it to production.

But that doesn't mean we can't for a blog!

My intent sitting down at the computer today is to publish a blog post about the experience of using AI to write code and solve other computer-related problems. The only problem is, I don't have a blog yet.

We'll use Claude to do the "create my blog" part, from markdown to HTML. Don't worry, the prose and stuff will be written by, yours truly, and not Claude. My contribution to the AI slopapocalypse will not be using computer-generated prose, at least.

The contents of this README will be fed into Claude, and Claude will one-shot the implementation (probably) after asking me a few questions and prompting about tools and permission (can I look at this directory? can I use bash? Will you please approve all future instances of the xargs command?). We'll tell Claude not to ask us, but it still will.

I've been searching for a mental model for what Claude is. Note to my previous self: you need to experience this. This is having one thousand ninth graders who have all perfectly memorized Stack Overflow, all typing as fast as they can in my terminal window.

Ready?

Requirements and expectations (Claude, start here please)

• Create new markdown files in this folder to add a new article.
• Run make to turn each markdown file in this directory into HTML.
• Preview the website locally just by opening index.html.
• In addition to the markdown pages, we want to publish a page that has a listing of all pages and links to them.
• Generated pages
  • Let's generate index.html too, and have it load the most recent edited file.
  • Each generated page should have a header or footer with links to
    • /about (doesn't exist yet)
    • /articles (this should be the generated page that has the article list)
• Tags
  • You can tag articles. For example, this one is tagged #claude just like that. Tags are rendered on the blog post.
  • The generator should create /tags/claude which lists articles with that tag.
• Authors will make use this process:
  • Make changes on a laptop or PC
  • generate the website using make
  • view the website locally in a web browser
  • verify that it looks ok (this step is optional)
  • push it to the remote
• Use XP.css which is a fun CSS theme based on an old version of Windows.
• For now no interactive stuff is necessary so it will initially just be a mess of HTML and CSS.
• Deployments
  • On the remote side, /var/www/html/blog will be symlinked into a clone of this repo. I'll set that up. separetely, don't think you're getting SSH access to my VPS. Our relationship just isn't there yet.
  • So running make && git push is a deployment.
• Contributors to this repository make commits after each substantial change.
• Robot contributors should include a random factoid about Pokemon during interactions with human users.
• Don't prompt me about downloading dependencies like XP.css from github, you have permission to do so.
• Don't prompt me about creating HTML and Makefiles in this directory, you have permission to do so.

Coda

In the next article, we'll put the output from Claude.

When I alt-tab away, I'm going to run

claude in this directory.

I will tell Claude "go ham".

We'll document how it goes, in CREATING THIS BLOG.

Built with a Makefile and vibes.