For many people, creating this little sliver of a web application would be child’s play. That is not the case for me.
The site in question is a simple effort to track what I am reading, what I have read and what I plan to read. Currently I don’t read enough. I tend to read in fits and starts rather than constantly. This year my discovery of baseball really impacted my reading. It turns out that staying up most nights to watch Shohei Ohtani hit dingers does not help with a tight reading schedule. I will elaborate on my newfound passion for baseball at a later date.
When I do read, I enjoy keeping track of what I consume as I find it makes recommending good books so much easier. I had attempted to track my reading habits via Twitter threads in the past but it was far from an aesthetically pleasing solution.
Although I have spent most of my working life in and around digital media I have never had to interact with anything more complicated than a CMS or a display banner insertion. A long ways away from real dev work. The site you are reading this on is built off a simple template, you can read how I made it here. It was very easy.
I am no AI zealot, but I do recognize its usefulness. I have been gradually incorporating ChatGPT into my daily work. My main takeaway has been that it makes me lazier. Kilotons of computing power dedicated to organizing the data in my excel sheet because I don’t feel like doing so myself.
Over the last while I had seen tweets about Replit - an AI powered coding tool that professed to make coding websites or apps a possibility for the non adepts. Curious, I decided to try it out and signed up for the $25 monthly plan.
I tasked the AI with the following:
And so we began. The first project reached a dead end, something to do with the Google Sheets integration. The AI Agent kept getting stuck so I brought in extra help: I relayed the conversation into ChatGPT and asked it to scold the AI Agent and give stern instructions. In a surreal turn of events this worked well. The more powerful AI coercing the other one to do a better job. I told it to imagine it was an angry Senior Dev on a deadline.
Things started moving and soon enough we had a working prototype of the site inside the Replit environment. The AI had come up with everything, the design and layout from minimal cues and it had managed to plug in the different data sources. Now I wanted to get the site online, keeping it in Replit would cost $25 a month, far too much for a toy web site.
Enter GPT once again: I asked for a plan and it walked me through exporting my project. I then asked it to assume I was 5 years old and explain it to me like I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. The AI responded with incredibly detailed instructions that I wont go through here but together we ended uploading it on GitHub and then deploying it on a free tier on the cloud application platform Render. A few DNS configurations later and we have: https://bibli.nicholasoconnor.com
It is a fully working site that feeds itself off Google Sheets data and will hopefully exist long into the future. It may also be mildy interesting to people, I love snooping through people's bookshelves so here you can do the same to me digitally.
This simple project is an example of what is to come. In general, I know how websites work but the gap between me and a junior dev is huge. Here I was able to build this entire thing from scratch aided only by faceless AI agents. It was an enjoyable experience, the sensation of being able to manipulate the previously unknown was empowering, addicting even. I would like to build something else in the near future.
The AI does get a lot wrong, the prompts have to be clear and sometimes even aggressive to keep it on track but it will only get better. I hate the cliché but the possibilities really are endless. It is something that I would really recommend trying out if you have any interest in putting something online or just want to mess around with some ideas.
In the meantime please stop by the library:
