For all the potential problems that come with vibe coded stuff, generating/composing one-off fix-it scripts can be damned handy. For example, this blog got a big tune-up over the past day: almost 2000 embedded images have been unbroken.
For a lot of years I maintained a personal online photo gallery using Gallery2, but as it hadn’t been maintained since 2012, used a lot of server space, and had a very not-modern feel to it, I shut it down in mid-2020 and made a static archive that I just hosted at home. The biggest problem with doing so was that this blog had a lot of images hotlinked into there, so all those posts broke.
Fixing this manually was a pain, and while I kept a copy of the database+images around, somehow using that to fix things was a Big Task that I never started on.
Enter the modern world of AI-assisted coding and over the past few days of vacation, between riding bikes and walks and such, I prompted Claude to develop a solution. What it generated was a series of scripts that identified all posts containing images hotlinked to the old gallery location, found the related images, uploaded them into the Media Library, then edited each post to make it work.
That’s 1994 blog posts whose images have been restored; things like my Low-Cost Fat Bike Stand post are now working again.
This is where I find a ton of benefit to AI tools such as this: putting together the middle (the code) to fix up problems. If the inputs and desired outputs are known, and one can sanity check the system as it evolves, a lot can get done. And quickly. Tools like this have also been hugely beneficial at work, saving me absurd amounts of time with analyzing log files (eg: network captures, Process Monitor output) where I no longer have to timeline things myself.
I’m past the point where I’m surprised, but I’m still really impressed. This has been a long-standing back-of-my-mind problem/quirk with my site that I’d just sort of accepted… But here we are, it’s fixed. Yay!
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