The Famous Garfish's Tank

I started writing this before the summer holiday and am finishing it now that the holidays are over (summer is not), so it might read a bit disjointed, because it is.

Summer blues

Summer is here and ever since I was little I have felt the anticipatory sadness of summer ending as soon as it starts. Free time and sunny days, so many plans and half-formed ideas of activities, endless hours of just gaming or hanging around at the communal pool, going to the forest. But the idea of the holidays ending and school resuming always hung over everything, autumn was always just around the corner. I don’t know whether this is a common feeling or a product of my anxiety (which also is a common condition). I am working on just enjoying the moment and not thinking too much about the fleeting nature of everything. But this feeling of the summer ending when in reality it just started has many forms in my daily life as an adult.

Free time<...

I have already written about my thoughts on how ethical I think coding with AI is and how I currently feel about bot sitting as a coding tool, as well as the current state of this page as a product of bot sitting. To round off this collection of initial meta posts, wanted to give a comprehensive recipe of my current workflow to create the page and its content.

Ingredients

• IDE: Cursor, a VS Code flavor that has various AI integrations in an all-in-one package. I mostly used it as a convenient entry point to agentic coding. It offers a paid plan that includes tokens for all major models and providers. Alternatively, you may use of your own API keys if yo...

Webmaster? Hardly.

The idea of what this personal website is or should be has changed over the two-ish weeks since its creation. Originally, I just wanted to make some kind of website to learn more about how HTML and CSS work and where their limits are. I had a few stabs at this before joining Neocities. The obligatory demo page in my school’s CS class. Back then, Geocities was still around and some kids had personal pages, but most of us were hanging out on a regional network called Kwick. A proto-MySpace where predominantly German teens were tinkering with flashy profile pages that were fully customizable with HTML and were making friends for life in open chatrooms. I still sometimes talk to A, who lived half a country away from me then, multiple countries now.

Last christmas, inspired by the Youtube algorithm that inspires most my hobbies theses days, I wanted to try my hand at full-stack ...

Vibe coding

Vibe coding has become the expression du jour for letting large language models (LLMs) write code for you. It lives on a spectrum between the agentic, fully integrated IDE that runs commands, reads files and writes new ones at the merest suggestion you want it to do something and glorified autocomplete.

Please, I had a long day, stop calling it that

I know, as a self-identified grump and hater, the term ‘vibe coding’ makes me die a little inside every time I read it or hear it used unironically. But saying it is fun. It’s one of those terms that the youths, the rappers (same thing) or the nerds would allegedly use as slang, but really, it’s mostly your streamer’s favourite streamer and other millennials using it compulsively (‘ironically’). Like the ancient ‘YOLO’, ‘pwned’, ‘gank’, ‘1337’ and ‘swag’, or the more recent ‘...

I am making this website for myself to learn about web design and development. I use various AI tools to write HTML and CSS, because I love seeing quick results and learn well by looking at and modifying code. I do not use AI to write content on this page unless specified otherwise. I do not use AI to generate images or other media for this page. I will experiment with generated ASCII-art, because I feel that is ethical-ish.

When I first wrote this disclaimer, it got me to reflect more deeply on where I draw the line and why. I am not sure I have a definitive conclusion.

I would describe myself as a skeptic of AI and a hater of its evangelists and most implemenations/’products’. I do not like the way that a lot of it tastes of the same get-rich-quick, break-things-move-fast, quasi-religious scam soup that comprises most of the modern technological scene.

I am not an artist and have not yet found AI generated art that I enjoy. N...