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Yesterday's Claude Experiments

So I've been playing with Claude programming for a while via the web browser, this week I added it into my desktop VS Code to see how it worked. I pay for the minimum for a Claude account and I wasn't sure how it would work for me since I wasn't paying for Claude Code higher tiers.

Turns out, it works very well. Basically I get a certain amount of usage in hour chunks, and also overall for a week. After two days of use I've used roughly half of the week's quota. Which, honestly is pretty good for my casual project use case.

The quality of the code has been largely very solid. Everything I'm asking it to do are things which have well defined patterns which makes the quality better since it has more experience to pull from.

I also experimented with using self hosted Qwen 3.5 Coder and unfortunately the coding quality gap remains quite noticeable. Hopefully someday.

Claude enabled me to work through basically my entire backlog of Glowbug bugs and feature ideas. Many of these being things from over a year ago where the friction of doing it overcame my need to do it since this is a personal project.

Beyond those, I did some quality of life updates and general improvements.

Here is an incomplete list:

• Refactored the publish functionality for the statice website to make it smarter. Since I wrote it, it has basically required full archive updates on every publish.
• A general pass of security vulnerabilities and bugs identified in code
• Updated and improved the template engine in Glowbug
• Updated and improved how tags are handled by the system, including improving my admin page for them and adding tag archive pages with pagination for ones which go very long
• Added new code that allows me to input footnotes as part of a post.
• Fixed the bug with how the spoiler function works where it now hides text across multiple lines, this was a longstanding bug but since I use the spoiler tag so infrequently it's languished in the backlog
• Added an improved system for managing my movie radars for rating them, including integrating them directly into search and pulling movie information via API. Previously they were just implemented in a post's body with no overall tracking.
• I realized my coding backlog / todo is short enough that I should implement it into glowbug's admin itself rather than use a 3rd party tracker. So we coded a simple tracker into the admin section.
• I had it rewrite and improve most of my admin pages. They are all still barebones, but it added functionality and improved how they perform.

To be clear, in all cases, I review the code it writes. I don't merge anything without reading it and making sure I understand it or understand the gist of it.

It's been an interesting experiment and I definitely see the value for my use cases as a hobbyist coder and since I am using well trodden and documented languages and use cases. There are definitely still bugs it creates that I have to generate, but it has definitely saved me time overall these past few days.

Kristopher Shinn

I discovered this local photographer on X and I am obsessed with his work.

This is an experimental post which utilizes new functions on the blog.^{1Alphabet soup anyone?} This is a feature I've had on my backlog for a while and I'm finally implementing for potential future use in the blog.

We'll see how it does, I'm not sure.^{2Well, that's not true, I kind of know. I looked at the code, although I did use Claude to code this update for me as I experiment with it for desktop coding projects.}

Ratatouille (2007)

Mission Impossible (1996)

Crazy to think that this movie is thirty years old. Well, I say that, but so much of this movie is aged. From the dial up internet and bad technology, to the style and cinematography.

Stunning

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Splashdown

I have missed being excited for regular manned space missions. Thank you to Artemis II mission and its crew for reminding me the joy and awe that these can bring.

My favorite photo from this mission:

Late Night Thoughts

I've recently developed a new habit of waking up in the middle of the night and being up for an hour or two. Last night was a rough one and it took me a while to fall back asleep, but as I tried - I had two thoughts which, at the time, seemed profound enough to share.

If I ever go into a coma, I just know I'm going to play an entire game of dwarf fortress and wake up from the coma and begin to cry, realizing it was all a dream.

A joke on the supposed story of a woman who had a coma and in three years lived an entire life and had a family and everything. Now, I went researching to try and find out more about this story and it could very well be an Internet hoax as I couldn't find any verifiable information this morning.

--

Happiness is our survival mechanism telling us we're living.

I fell down a rabbit hole where my tired brain backtracked the happiness through the feelings that define it, such pleasure, fulfillment, and contentment, as all being things our subconscious uses to pull us in positive directions. Which, in a world of survival, is a very good thing. Part of today's problems are that that has been weaponized against us such that we can literally have too much pleasure.