Two posts in one day? Monsieur, with these Rocher you are really spoiling us. I realised earlier this week that we have now entered the era of Disposable Apps and Disposable UIs. Not single-function Apps but single-use Apps, with a GUI and a Backend. Generated in < 5 mins by Claude Code or Codex and lots of APIs. Here’s a sub-screen of my throwaway Bedrock Mantle tester from yesterday. First prompt to Claude Code at 15:56. »
I honestly can’t understand how Amazon is doing such a dreadful job of communicating how to use Bedrock Mantle or even what it is. Every blogpost about new supported models links to information pages that are factually useless if you want to use them. Yesterday I finally figured out, with the help of some random Python script in a random GitHub repo, not made by Amazon, how to get a list of the real model names you need to use. »
In an early Christmas gift to everyone, the legendary Fabrice Bellard released a tiny new JavaScript engine called Micro QuickJS. As someone who has been using Espruino for years and was responsible for ushering the NodeConf EU 2017/2018/2019 digital conference badges into being, this obviously caught my attention immediately. I looked at the small stack of ESP32 C6, H2 and S3 boards on my desk and thought “well this could be fun”. »
For personal projects, I generally follow Andrej Karpathy’s original definition of Vibe Coding - I don’t look at the generated code, I just tell the LLM what I want, paste in the error messages and iterate until it gives me the output I need. But that’s a lot easier to do when you’ve been writing software for 40+ years and know what to ask for! But when it comes to creating Open Data projects, I often find that the challenge isn’t the code, it’s the data. »
Whilst we’re all accelerating 10x with Vibe Coding, it’s only one piece of the process. We need an entire Vibe Pipeline. I want to move that fabulous Vibe-Coded app on http://localhost:3000 to a fully secure deployed solution with Auth, CI/CD, a domain and a cert by literally saying “take that fabulous app on http://localhost:3000 and deploy it securely with Auth, CI/CD, a domain and a cert”. As lots of us have said recently - Heroku for Vibe Coding. »
I’ve never given up on RSS. It still provides enormous utility for me. The silly number of RSS converters in my GitHub account are testament to that. The recent removal of all RSS feeds from the EPA Ireland site was a major disappointment and I’ve been forced to Vibe Code a horror of a replacement scraper using their dreadful API instead. In contrast, my heart skipped a beat when I started going through the README for Microsoft’s NLWeb. »
I’ve been using Node-RED for many years, mostly for fun and personal projects. The coolest thing I did with it was to build the prototype for the NodeConf EU 2018 badge back-end. But 2024 is the first time I’ve worked with it in production, with the ServisBOT team doing some pretty incredible things using it. One aspect I’ve been interested in recently is local persistence beyond context stores. Of course my first port of call was the world’s greatest database, SQLite. »
Over the past 18 months or so, I’ve been replacing various IFTTT and Low-Code functions with my own code running either in GitHub Actions or AWS Lambda. The latest one is a simple function to save all my latest GitHub Stars to Pinboard once an hour. This way, no matter what IFTTT/Zapier/etc decide to change this month, I don’t have to change anything. Some of my Serverless functions have been running for years with no updates required. »
My wonderful late mother-in-law Mary bought us an original massive George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine more than 10 years ago. Like most people we discovered it was pretty rubbish at cooking almost everything but was a superb toasted sandwich maker. With 5 kids, we have easily toasted thousands of cheese-based sambos. Unfortunately, as with all non-stick surfaces, eventually it wore away on the grill until it became a stick surface. »
Yesterday I was amused and faux-shocked to see that the company who did more to damage RSS than any other, got rid of the RSS feed for its Chrome Developer Blog. So this morning I gave ChatGPT a few nudges/samples and it generated a basic Python script to create the feed. GitHub Copilot took care of some refinements and GitHub Actions took care of generating the feed once per hour and providing it via GitHub Pages. »