I wanted to try out Cline on a medium-sized project. For a long time I wanted to move away from a static generator like Eleventy to a simple bash or Python script that generates html and css that I can ftp to wherever.
I ended up doing much more than that. All in all I worked on it for a couple of days. Without Cline it would have taken me more than a week, I suspect.
Creating the Python script
I didn’t want to reuse my existing Eleventy partial html fragments and css, so I instructed AI to generate a static website starting from the list of posts in in the posts directory. I then showed AI a picture of my site and asked it to generate a similar one.
We then worked on the list of Code projects generated from the projects.yaml file (I should auto-generate this from specially marked projects on github …). Also, we created the Tags page looking at the front matter of the posts.
After a few iterations, refactorings, and bug fixes, we had a working site similar to the one I had before.
The new one is slightly simpler graphically, not because I couldn’t do it, but because I chose not to.
This is the 232 lines of Python code that generates the site. To my eyes, the situation is vastly simplified, as I don’t need to understand the intricacies of Eleventy anymore. Everything has become embarrassingly obvious.
Adding a commenting system
In my folly, I don’t want any Javascript on my site.
In the past, I used Disqus, then webmentions, then nothing. But nothing is a bit on the harsh side of life.
I decided to use Github issues as database for the comments. I know about utterances, but I don’t want to use it as it is Javascript based. So I came up with a super simple scheme, where each post has a link to a github query containing the post title. That brings up the correct issue for the post and you can add comments to that.
It is very primitive as you cannot create a comment from the site itself, you need a Github account, etc… etc… But it is simple and it works, no Javascript required.
I also had a bunch of json files with comments from the past. I instructed AI to create a script that automatically generates issues from the posts and comments from the json files. It created another 300 lines of Python (mostly because of the bizarre rate limitations on the Github API).
I haven’t even looked at the script. It is enough that it worked once (took it one night, who knows??).
So now I have imported all the comments from the past and have a working commenting system, for some definition of “working”.
Fixing badly formatted old posts
And now for something that I would have never done without AI. I had a bunch of very old posts that contained very badly formatted and broken code.
The system I used at the time embedded html tags in the markdown. Properly formatting them one by one would have taken a lot of time as there is no automatic way of doing it.
Most of those posts are obsolete, but still I didn’t like them to be in such bad shape. It bugged me.
“AI, buddy, please fix them for me”. And it did. It took a few hours, but it did it. I had to spend a few dollars on consumption, but it worked like a charm.
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