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Comment by MidnightRider39 | Hacker News Reader

My personal page runs on 11ty since the last 3 years and I enjoyed it a lot.

I’ll probably replace it with pure HTML soon - I found that I don’t need a SSG anymore, I can just use a local LLM to generate HTML out of markdown files and I never use any fancy features anyway.

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Yes, I find LLMs are great for taking loosely-structured text and turning them into formatted blog posts. https://notes.npilk.com/chatgpt-is-my-ssg

From your post:

> ChatGPT responds with a fully-populated HTML template. All I have to do is copy and paste it into a new file in my project, run my custom script, and then push the changes.

This actually sounds more troublesome to me than adding a markdown file into a Git repo somewhere, and having Hugo/Astro/whatever automagically regenerate all the HTML files from markdown.

But that's probably because static site hosting services have come very far from the S3 bucket days.

The "build step" with Hugo/Astro might be slightly simpler. But as mentioned in the post, I find it surprisingly nice not to have to write strict Markdown. It turns out (at least for me) that formatting with Markdown still feels akin to creating a finished product. It's nice to just be able to type something out without thinking too much and have the LLM "get what you mean".

Local LLM feels like the wrong tool for a file converter? LLMs shine in natural language processing, but their statistical nature doesn't fit consistent file conversions as more Turing-like programs.

I'm sure you know about pandoc for translating markdown into html (and all it's other tricks).

Yea but that still requires a non-zero amount of time to setup and most importantly maintain and keep up to date.

Pure HTML generated from a text file just works and probably will forever.

I mean it’s just my personal website which is mostly just for me to look up things quickly / personal wiki

But the text file has some markup syntax beyond human language? Point being LLMs are subpar for acting on formal grammars, like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. That's why its important tools like 11ty and pandoc remain.

That’s somewhat true (in my case it’s it’s laughably simple though).

I also never said that tools like pandoc are obsolete now. Just in my case they are already overpowered and I might migrate to something simpler soon. Otoh i might just run the current version of 11ty indefinitely and never upgrade.

I'm also using 11ty on a couple projects, but I abhore the npm ecosystem.

I'm considering letting an LLM generate a flat python script to replace what 11ty does for me. Once removed from the fracas, it should be stable for decades.

If using an LLM why bother with python? Go for straight shell scripts.

That’s exactly my plan. Too burned out on the npm ecosystem. I don’t have time to update all that shit constantly for a fucking static HTML page

Exactly, so many people reach for these complex toolings and ecosystems.

Their static pages are just a bunch of fucking text files you can print with some CLI commands.

Wouldn't Astro work great here though?

Just a static sites without JavaScript but you still get some nice things like scoped CSS, components and being able to use markdown for blog posts.

Yea I tried Astro but I don’t want to learn their way of doing things, have breaking changes every x months/years and who knows in a couple years they maybe also are screwed.

Pure HTML will work probably forever. Previously it was too much manual work for me to write it but now the LLM just spits it out, easy as

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