[techscruggs]

Let me make sure I am hearing you right. 1) The person you report to asked you to accomplish a discrete task 2) of standing up one of the most common websites on the planet 3) and your response was to begin building your own custom CMS?

I know I am removing the train of thought that led you down this path, but is there anything I just said that is factually false?

[sshine]

I’ll try to tell the story in a more responsible way: My boss asked me to install a WordPress, to which I advised against it; while it’s easy to set up, it doesn’t align with our tech stack (his main team won’t be able to support it easily, woohoo army of juniors!), and the convenience of a quick start is outweighed by having a thing that needs CVE patching when, guess what never got hacked: pure, static HTML.

Since my wife had asked me twice the same week to set up a website with a design mock she’d sent me, I thought: what’s holding me back in both cases from giving them a Claude Design’ed Hugo theme is that they need to edit Markdown on their filesystem and run terminal commands.

So I picked an item out of my infinite backlog, which was very well-defined: a web dashboard that acts as the equivalent of the WordPress admin page that lets you manage a Hugo static site, use a rich editor on top of Markdown, and commit to git instead of a database. I spent the better part of a weekend making this, with my wife as the customer, and when it got good enough, I presented it to my boss. He was happy with the choice, but mostly because of the vibed design, he ultimately didn’t care about the technology.

When someone wants “a WordPress” they’re asking for convenience of an easily updated website.

You don’t have to actually give them a WordPress.

[igetspam]

AI has helped us all lose the plot because now we don’t just know better than everyone else, we can prove it by project managing our better versions of the same things.

What I find really great is that we’re only a prompt or two away from proper docs for these novel solutions but we still don’t make them and if we do, we definitely don’t read them first.

[sshine]

I’ll say “proper docs” has shifted for me for two reasons

I used to insist on commenting code richly, so I could better read it. But comments lie, while code is truth. Read the code, that’s what it does.

With AI, the cognitive overhead of getting a human-worded explanation of what’s true, is one prompt away and is never a stale leftover.

So the purpose of docs: Specs for implementing and getting an architectural overview, and API documentation for exploring the interface of something new.

What I find great is that people still don’t test their code when it became practically free to do so.

[asp_hornet]

Is this the “taste” I keep hearing people say they bring?