Commentary

If Part 1’s theme was attempting to ‘vibe’ through golang text templates with codex then Part 2’s theme is attempting to ‘vibe’ through updates to a legacy javascript library with Gemini CLI. As planned this did not go as planned. I recommend skimming Part 1’s narrative, if not reading, as the following builds on it incrementally. Context, again First, a brief refresh on the origin of this work. I was dissatisfied with an existing hugo theme for my image gallery. I also wanted to present images using modern formats like avif which are unsupported by hugo’s builtin processing capabilities. This had impacts on how the templates for my new theme were structured. It also meant client side, in browser client, processing of image tags (e.g. exif or XMP data) for presentation. ...

Originally, I was going to write about using OpenAI Codex versus Google Gemini CLI to help me code my personal photos website. I could and may still do that, however, here we’ll tell a story about building a Hugo theme with codex, where things went right, and where they did not. We might also take digressions into commentary on the reality of software development and the 1986 Fred Brook’s essay ‘No Silver Bullet…’. ...

This is a continuation from a post in April, 2023 on low-code and AI. ...

Should organizations that need to build software care about low code? Should they ever have cared about low code? Will low code be the future of how software is built? Will large language models trained to write code based on text prompts replace all developers? Are these same questions applicable to AI? Do I have answers to these questions? Nope, but I can still editorialize. ...