Hack-a-Day is my self-imposed challenge to do one project a day, for all of November.

This is my first exception this year - a project that took TWO days (despite best efforts). About 15 hours.

I wrote a program which can take a PDF, and then get it self-published (through lulu.com), and sent to my house.

Source code is on github. This project was co-written with AI, with Claude doing the heavy lifting.

I learned some Playwright along the way.

Expect to see me posting about a bunch of wacky books in the future. Today's is reasonable -- just my recent cookbook update

Today's project was a vibe-coded chat program. For those unfamiliar, "vibe coding" is programming where an AI does the majority of the coding, and in fact is often undertaken by non-programmers. In my case I took an approach a bit closer to "architect" than entirely hands-off, but an LLM did all the heavy lifting.

The code is here -- roughly one commit per interaction, with a few combined. The prompts are not included.

I've mostly been using AI very little during hack-a-day... sometimes to help debug, and in one case to write another "boring bit" (convert Minecraft world to JSON, for the voxel engine). It might get stuff done, but it's not going to improve the same set of skills to do stuff with an AI. And I'm generally a bit wary of using AI, because it can really just spew some absolute bullshit, which is in my head afterwards.

I've had a relatively better experience using Anthropic's Claude than most other products (for which I have a paid plan). Unfortunately they have very opaque usage caps, and I'd hit limits repeatedly during this project. Then it would say "please try again at 4pm" (in 3 hours). So I pretty much ran out of LLM usage on this one.

Overall I'd say I got to do some coding I usually wouldn't. The project was a curses frontend for a chat (and backend, but that didn't really get done yet). Something like making a curses interface would usually be a bit too boring for me--being able to collaborate with an LLM, who doesn't find such things boring, is great. Other than tooling issues, the main problem is that Claude doesn't write the best code. It generally has a very "junior programmer" vibe, with no use of abstraction, and tends toward the verbose.

My general take on AI though is that someone showed me a horse than can write an essay, and I'm complaining its penmanship is atrocious. It's pretty amazing stuff, and we're probably all going to be dead soon.

In the meantime it's pretty fun to mess about with.

PS: I do plan to update this one further, it just will require a bit of work each day given the rate limits. I had really grand plans, but we only got the bare minimum done.

Peace out!

Today's hack-a-day project was the German Language Reader. It shows you the text of "German Legends" by the Brothers Grimm. Yes, the same brothers known for "Grimm's Fairy Tales" and perhaps less-so, the first dictionary.

If you highlight a word, you get the definition in english.

You can try it online. As usual, source code is on github.

I had hoped to have a German mode, but the German wiktionary API has been down for a week!

If you're technically inclined, it's not too bad to substitute in your own book. You'll need it in TXT format (to extract the words), and HTML format (to display).

I'm happy with this project, although I am posting it on the 10th, quite a bit late.

I had some minor help from Claude.

Enjoy!

Yikes, been having some back pain, and the past few days it's been tougher to work. I've started four projects in four days, without too much to show for it.

• Day 01 project is waiting on computation to run; overall I'm happy with it but will post when I get the results.
• Day 02 project I barely started and won't finish, most likely. It takes a photo of a Go board and tries to output the game. I'd learn some image processing doing it, but I'm sure there's plenty of existing and better tools to do the same thing.
• Day 03 project was a bit ambitious. Will post it if I finish (and hopefully I will, it's cool!)

Today's hack-a-day project was Reverse Vibe Coding. I sometimes use LLMs such as Claude for "vibe coding", mostly on throwaway type projects. It didn't seem fair for that to go only one way, so today I offered to vibe code for Claude -- it picks what I should make, and I code it up for Claude.

The result is the Conversation Flow Visualizer. This graphs when new topics come up in conversation, and what they are.

Frankly I think it's dumb and useless, but Claude is the boss, so there ya go! Can't pick who you work fo... okay, I guess I could this time.

In any case, it was pretty relaxing to be a junior dev and just do as I'm told for a bit, honestly. Easy win.

I honestly think this would be a good way to learn a new programming language or a new library.

Peace out!