Vibing with Pocilot
I’m closing out day 6 of a 10-day staycation. I hate it a little. It’s not that I can’t wait to get back to work, exactly. I love the time to myself. However, I feel anxious and unemployed. You’d think I’d spend the time catching up on creative projects and so forth, but I’ve mostly been in a scrollhole or cleaning my apartment while feeling crappy from not sleeping well. And listening to a lot of Devo. Love the Devo.
I spent a few hours working on this site today. I’ve been learning to ✨vibe code✨ with Copilot in Visual Studio Code.1 Working with Copilot is very much like pairing with a junior dev who knows the technical details of everything but still needs a lot of guidance in applying them according to the business requirements. It can also get stuck in deep, deep ruts, freak out as it tries to dig itself out, and make the problem 10x worser. It’s almost human.
There were frustrating hiccups along the way, leaving me with some goofy bits of code to clean up here and there, but on the whole it was a very productive session. We managed to get a couple of days’s2 work done in about 3 hours: restructuring the default theme to use cleaner semantic markup with Microdata and A11y features, fixing some mobile display issues, creating a deploy pipeline, and implementing a command to stub out new posts.
I’m planning to add a new section soon, in which I catalog and briefly review the various art books in my collection. I have a lot of them. I think it will be a fun way to get to know them all better. I could make a whole new site for that. It wouldn’t be too hard, but I’m on this kick where I want to endorse a Handcrafted Web where people make websites for fun and to share information and hobbies. Like we used to do before everyone got addicted to social media, developing brain rot and cluster B political disorders at scale. A website that’s not a brand or business model or any of that. Adding sections willy-nilly seems like the way to further those ends.
Footnotes
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Neither VS Code nor Copilot are my favorite tool available. I am actually a hater on both, but they’re what everyone uses at my office, so there’s financial incentive to make them work for me. ↩
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I’ve given up on Grammarly for my grammar checking. It was constantly tone policing me even though I had disabled that feature. And it wanted me to write “that” everywhere. That, that, that, that! I’m using LanguageTool for automated proofing now instead. It’s pretty good so far. I’m using a premium version that does the processing in the cloud, but I’m pretty sure you can run it locally in a Docker container if you have secret business to write about. ↩