This site is statically generated with a python script that I wrote in 2021. It was a pretty simple script, and as more entries have been added, the user experience has gotten worse. Last week, I fixed that.
The aim of this site generator was simplicity - plain HTML for pages (yep, I hand author HTML), that the script puts a tempate header/styling around, and generates an index page/RSS feed for. Most of this worked fairly well, but when generating the index pages it would grab the first image from the page and use that as the thumbnail. Do you see the problem? It didn't thumbnail the image, it just used it's URL directly. This was fine when there were only one or two entries per category, but now there are dozens in each it could result in the index being a couple dozen megabytes.
So my first attempt was to try AI agentic coding tools. I tried claude code running with some local models (using anon-kode), but they failed completely. So I tried actual claude code. It also churned and failed. Then I looked at the code it was working with and ... ewwwww. Man, it was a mess. It was only a few hundred lines, but the flow of data through it was very obscure. So I spent an evening refactoring it.
Its been a while since I've looked back at old code and gone "eww" but it's good to know that I'm apparently still improving at software dev! Or at least, my opinions are still changing.
So, anyway, enjoy faster page load times!