notes on refacoring with AI

August 5, 2025

I am rebuilding the thing that builds this website. Why? Because i got bored

what have I done?

I built this thing starting with a piece of code that some guy posted on a nerd news site. It was writtin in Python, had one section, no keywords and was just black text on a white background. Once i had it working on my own hardware I started noticing that it didn’t have as much functionality as i wanted, so I started to add things to it.

I am not a deep Python programmer so i turned to ChatGPT to do a lot of the work. In the early days, I would ask for a change and then ask chat to spit out a new full script. This worked well at first, but as the project got larger, someitmes it would add what i wanted and then remove something else that was important to me.

I added several sections. I added the ability to have hidden secret sections that were on the website but weren’t visible to someone who is just clicking around. I added the ability to make youtube thumbnails. I imported information from a couple of other sources, including my livejournal, which had long ago been pulled into a cloud-hosted wordpress site and the contents of my own hosted website. I even managed to pull in the history of all my SMS text messages (MMS messages remain out of my grasp). I even added a keyword generator. I included icons to my own socials and the ability to send me an email of you felt so inclined. I made it so that i could maintain more than one website using the same code. I tracked all of my progress using git on my local network storage.

Then I ran out of new ideas of things to add. I started to add more content since that was after all the point of the thing: my own website where i can post what i want without having to be concerned about community standards. But the site still has my name all over it, and in a world where one can’t entirely dismiss the notion of jack booted thugs beating down my door because of an opinion I’ve expressed, I am still censoring myself.

So I stood up another domain that I owned that doesn’t have a clear definition of purpose in the name but i have been having a hard time deciding what to do with it really.

Meantime, i keep reading the hacker news site and read an article that suggeted that for “vibe coding” languages that were typed were better than than ones that aren’t. Python is not really typed. The article suggested Rust or Go. Rust is used for system-level stuff. Increasingl parts of the Linux kernel is being recoded in Rust. Go is a language created by google that looks like C, but was built to use things like multiple cores, which wasn’t an inherent part of the original idea of C

letting the machine define the machine

I decided that the expedient thing to do was to just take the current script, feed it into ChatGPT and tell it to convert it to a go program. I’ve done that with small tasks.. yes, like that bash script but can you do it in python?

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