Generating web apps with AI agents like Replit is incredibly powerful, enabling rapid prototyping and deployment. My experience building tldr.express, a personalized RSS feed summarizer, highlighted the importance of a detailed specification. While initial prompts yielded impressive results, I iteratively refined the app through configuration and additional prompts to address issues like email integration, AI model selection, output formatting, spam prevention, and bot mitigation. This iterative process reinforced that while AI agents excel at rapid generation, a well-defined specification upfront is crucial for a successful outcome.

Curious about who's visiting my site, I built a user-agent tracker using Vercel middleware and KV storage. It logs every request and displays a live table of user agents and hit counts, refreshing every minute. Check out the code on GitHub!

Building apps with LLMs and agents like Replit has been incredibly productive. The generated code is often vanilla and repetitive, raising questions about the future of frameworks. While frameworks offer abstractions and accelerate development, LLMs seem to disregard these patterns, focusing on implementation. This shift in software development driven by agents may lead to a world where direct code manipulation is unnecessary. It remains to be seen if frameworks and existing architectural patterns will still be relevant in this LLM-driven future or if new patterns will emerge.

Wow! Just realized I've been blogging for over 20 years, starting way back in August 2004 on kinlan.co.uk with Blogger. The journey has taken me through Posterous and landed me here on paul.kinlan.me with Hugo (and maybe Jekyll at some point). Sure, there's some cringe-worthy stuff in the archives, but it's my history. And honestly, I wouldn't be where I am today without this little corner of the internet. Huge thanks to Tim Berners-Lee and everyone who's made the web what it is!

This blog post lists various web apps I've generated using Repl.it and WebSim,

Reflecting on my journey with computers, from the C64 and Amiga 500 to the present day, I've found a renewed excitement in software development. New tools like repl.it and websim.ai empower rapid creation of full-stack, disposable web apps – software built for personal use and easily discarded. This ease of creation removes the barrier to starting projects, making the web an ideal platform for even single-user applications. It's a shift from handcrafted software to a more ephemeral approach, allowing for quicker prototyping and experimentation.

Experimented with WebSim, a simulated web environment, creating sites like a personal blog, timezone converter, interactive globe, and a travel site. The experience was reminiscent of the early web's playful exploration and highlighted WebSim's potential for creativity and interactive experiences.

In this blog post, I share some findings from my exploration of HTTP Archive data. I discovered that a significant number of websites using manifest.json files are using the default configuration generated by Create React App. I plan to investigate this further and determine how prevalent default manifest files are across the web.

I've made a couple of small changes to the blog. I removed the personal journal section and added my projects to the RSS feed so you can see what I've been working on with Generative AI. Happy New Year!

I explored using ChatGPT's Code Interpreter to analyze browser compatibility data from the BCD project. My goal was to determine the latest released versions of different browsers. While the initial results weren't perfect, through a few iterations of feedback, the Code Interpreter generated a Python script that accurately extracted the desired information. I was impressed by the speed and efficiency of this process, as it accomplished in minutes what would have taken me much longer manually. The generated code also provided a starting point for further analysis, like visualizing browser release timelines. Despite minor imperfections, the Code Interpreter proved to be a powerful tool for quickly extracting and analyzing data.