Or I could just tell Claude Code to do it and then spend some time cleaning it up afterwards. I had that thing working quite robustly in days! D A Y S!
(Then I had the bright idea of implementing a "track changes" mode which I'm still working on like a week and a half later, haha)
Even if you were already familiar with all that stuff, it's a lot of code to write to make it work! The stylesheets alone... Ugh! So glad I could tell the AI something like, "make sure it implements light and dark mode using VueUse's `useDark()` feature."
Almost all of my "cleanup" work was just telling it about CSS classes it missed when adding dark mode variants. In fact, most of my prompts are asking it to add features (why not?) or cleaning up the code (e.g. divide things into smaller, more concise files—all the LLMs really love to make big .vue files).
"Writing most of the code"? No. Telling it how to write the code with a robust architecture, using knowledge developed over two decades of coding experience: Yes.
I have to reject some things because they'd introduce security vulnerabilities but for the most part I'm satisfied with Claude Code spits out. GPT5, on the other hand... Everything needs careful inspection.
But I dunno. I kind of wonder how I would have acted with tech like this available when I first started years ago. As a young engineer and even now I live and breathe the code, obsessing over testing and all the thing that make software engineering so fun. But I can't say whether or not I would have overdepended on an LLM as a young engineer.
It's all kind of depressing IMO, but it is what it is at this point.
If theres enough interest, I might replicate some examples in an open source project.
To see if it is easy to digest, no repeated code etc or is it just slop that should be consumed by another agent and never by human.
Code is no different! You can tell an AI model to write something for you and that's fine! Except you have to review it! If the code is bad quality just take a moment to tell the AI to fix it!
Like, how hard is it to tell the AI that the code it just wrote is too terse and hard to read? Come on, folks! Take that extra moment! I mean, I'm pretty lazy when working on my hobby projects but even I'm going to get irritated if the code is a gigantic mess.
Just tell it, "this code is a gigantic mess. Refactor it into concise, human-readable files using a logical structure and make sure to add plenty of explanatory comments where anything might be non-obvious. Make sure that the code passes all the tests when you're done."
I think we'll be dealing with slop issues for quite some time, but I also have hopes that AI will raise the bar of code in general.