Simpler and More Complex

I’ve built another version of this site - in a day, this time! using Claude Code. It’s now using Astro + Svelte (tech I barely understand) and Cloudflare Pages.

It was so absurdly easy to build, and I’m happy with how it looks and performs. I’m writing this in my IDE, as a markdown file with some additional metadata (like title and date) as a section within it - it’ll be part of the static site. I once spent days getting a custom markdown parser working, and now AstroSvelteMagicCompilation

#makes it work
so = "easily"

I’m sure it’ll evolve. In the past I’d need to write a migrator for the metadata, or make it backwards compatible. Now Claude can just update all the blogs in the history when I want to make it richer.

I have a lot of mixed thoughts around AI - a topic for another time. It’s been a strange experience using Claude Code to build this, and it’s blazingly fast! It’s a weird feeling working with a codebase that I only understand at a higher level of abstraction. I know a lot of the tech used to build it, very well, so it doesn’t feel alien - just opaque in a lot of ways.

It’s a lot more complex in some sense. A complicated AI system is repeatedly running inference over the codebase and spawning a massive amount of files. It’s thrilling and terrifying from a security perspective…

And yet, my process of deploying it and writing the blog is much simpler. No headless blogging platform on a server I need to maintain - and if I did choose that, Claude could do it for me. This post is easy to write, easy to maintain, easy to evolve. I can build a local admin tool around it if I want, or an Obsidian plugin, or anything really. The idea for the site spills out into reality so quickly.

The esolang website for esoteric programming languages has a tongue in cheek language English. I remember stumbling across it in college, thinking that it’s the fixed point for programming language development.

So yeah, I wrote the blog and the website in English! And Claude tells me

“Simpler and More Complex” — capitalize “More” since it’s part of the coordinate adjective paired with “Complex” in the title.

I don’t know. Sounds legit.