Our second adult fan-service provider has entered the show in the form of a busty underrim-glasses-wearing bookworm, Imari. Could this show get any better? Well, yes, but jello-wrestling probably isn’t on the schedule.

This week, everyone falls in a hole in order to stumble across the Mineral Of The Week. Nagi is not only the voice of reason, but also the voice of A Proper Mentor, getting Imari out of her comfort zone and advancing her career path.

Verdict: thicc is apparently justice.

Windsurf stays on my mind…

My deathmatch project was quite small and self-contained, and even offline LLMs were able to wrap their tiny little “minds” around it, more or less. For my next attempt, I used the free trial of Windsurf to build something more elaborate: a vacation planner that mixes the categorized lists of Trello with the easy drag-and-drop of the Planyway plugin. That is, jettison all the other crap in both apps, and just have a bunch of events that can easily be moved around both between days and within days, so you can lay out an itinerary for the day and quickly update it on the fly. The real bonus is getting timezones right, which Trello still doesn’t do; it always edits and displays events in the web browser’s local time zone.

This time the experience wasn’t so smooth. I’m a dozen passes in, and it’s deferred the implementation of all of the drag-and-drop features because that’s apparently hard. The basic framework is there, but despite being part of the original specs, a fair number of features required multiple attempts to implement at all, much less correctly. Timezone issues required multiple screenshot uploads with detailed explanations. On the bright side, the screenshots and explanations actually worked.

In other words, it required a very detailed set of specifications, didn’t implement all of them, and would never have made any progress at all without extensive human testing and debugging experience. Even though this is still a tiny application (~1,000 lines of Python, ~1,000 lines of Javascript, and ~800 lines of HTML/CSS), it couldn’t be “vibed”.

Interesting note: it never occurred to the LLM that the color used to display text on a colored background mattered. I had to invoke the magic words “best practices for accessibility” to restrict the background color palette, and “strongly contrasting color” to ensure legibility. It then used actual Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I’d required best practices for security and authentication, but did not add the same wording to each other section of the specs…

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