Reslop in Claude

For the last few weeks I have been riding the wave of codex and claude code free resets (I wonder when the actual price will have to be paid for those tokens, but oh well). This allowed me to continue rewrite of my side project - something which I would normally not do, because who really can enjoy restyling a Bootstrap 2 based website? Certainly not me.

What’s new with slopping design of an app? Nothing new. Inconsistency, reinventing a slightly different wheel for the fifth time, going into crazy workarounds instead of taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture and fixing the root cause. On the upside, in the end, side users’ feedback was mostly positive, but let’s be honest - the bar was quite low - the site wasn’t even properly scaling on mobile and the whole thing was dated as hell.

Claude design prompt goes into these orange-beige colors every freaking time, but as the original had a lot of orange accents after minor tweaks the whole thing was kinda consistent with its initial form. LLM would constantly skip, omit, forget about minor details which can be quite frustrating at times. I feel like even if you use Opus you often get Sonnet quality at most. As Anthropic locks you into their agent/harness who really knows what requests get routed to which model - true black box at its finest.

Either way - I’m still quite impressed such things are even possible. I would never pick up this side project again due to the amount of rather not very innovative work; gluing it all together was still a chore, but it took a few sessions over a few days and not a few weeks. Building things can be really cheap, if you’re willing to accept all the shortcomings and strings attached. Building things fast will most likely result in not very maintainable code, it’s difficult to steer the model and ensure best practices if you can barely follow how the code is being structured.

But it is addictive. Seeing some progress after typing (or saying) a few sentences. Delegating a bugfix while making a coffee. I am, however, afraid to look into the state of the code - that’s why I will not look and simply enjoy this resurrected pet project for a bit.

See before/after in the video below: