The thing that has always stood out to me about WordPress, is that you can get a site up without any of the usual technical steps I associate with creating a site, but still have access to the innards of the site. Does it often go wrong, sure, but it is a lot more approachable for less technical users.

In contrast, typical web frameworks (even static sites) require a code change, build, deploy, etc to update many aspects of a site.

I view every single line of code as a liability, the best solution is if you can avoid writing any code. Does that put me into group 1 or group 2?

It's tough to not interpret this as "I don't care about my website". Do you not check the copy? Or what if AI one-shots something that will harm your reputation in the metadata?

Then I'll read the diffs after the fact and have fix AI it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That sounds better. I assume the stakes are low enough that you are happy reviewing after the fact, but setting up a workflow to check the diffs before pushing to production shouldn't be too difficult

Of course. I could do a PR review process, but what's the point. It is just a static website.

You would think that sending HTTP requests is a basic capability, but I've had fun in many languages doing so. Long ago (2020, or not so long ago, depending on how you look at it) I was surprised that doing an HTTP request on node using no dependencies was a little awkward:

  const response = await new Promise( (resolve, reject) => {
    const req = https.request(url, {
    }, res => {
      let body = "";
      res.on("data", data => {
        body += data;
      });
      res.on('end', () => {
        resolve(body);
      });
    });
    req.end();
  });

These days node supports the fetch API, which is much simpler. (It wasn't there in 2020, it seems to have been added around 2022-2023.)

Yes, thankfully! It's amusing to read what they say about fetch on nodejs.org [1]:

> Undici is an HTTP client library that powers the fetch API in Node.js. It was written from scratch and does not rely on the built-in HTTP client in Node.js. It includes a number of features that make it a good choice for high-performance applications.

[1] - https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/fetch

Why is it amusing?

I say amusing because it points out that something I (and many other people) assume to be basic clearly has a lot more nuance to it.

Note that node-fetch will silently ignore any overrides to "forbidden" request headers like Host, since it's designed for parity with fetch behavior in the browser. This caused a minor debugging headache for me once.

Web standards have rich support for incremental/chunked payloads, the original node APIs are designed around it. From this lens the Node APIs make sense.

And you don't handle errors at all...

It's node. Why do errors if you can simply ignore them.

Left as an exercise for the reader... ;p

I suspect that my normal workflows might just have evolved to route around the pain that package management can be in python (or any other ecosystem really).

In what situations are uv most useful? Is it once you install machine learning packages and it pulls in more native stuff - ie is it more popular in some circles? Is there a killer feature that I'm missing?

If you have hundreds of different Python projects on your machine (as I do) the speed and developer experience improvements of uv make a big difference.

I love being able to cd into any folder and run "uv run pytest" without even having to think about virtual environments or package versions.

Do you run those projects on the host system as your normal user without any isolation?

Yes, which makes me very vulnerable to supply chain attacks.

Yikes! I had a scare once, and since then I only run sandboxed code or scripts I've written with minimal 3rd party deps.

I assume you have other mitigations in place?

Not really. I have good backups and I try to stick with dependencies I trust.

I do a lot of my development work using Claude Code for web which means stuff runs in containers on Anthropic's servers, but I run things on my laptop most days as well.

Imo, uv scripts with the dependencies in the header.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

I guess that could be useful. I don't have many standalone python scripts, and those that I do have are very basic. It would be really nice if that header could include sandboxing!

So much this! I've been bugging Astral about addressing the sandboxing challenge for a while, I wonder if that might take more priority now they're at OpenAI?

UV is most useful because it is so much faster than everything else. All the other features I could do without.

Yep, the speed is nice, I can't argue with that!

At least in space there is lots of space and no heat /s - I'd love for Next to exist in a vacuum

While the license is important, it's the community that plays the key role for me. VC funder open source is not the same as community developed open source. The first can very quickly disappear because of something like a aquihire, the second has more resilience and tends to either survive and evolve, or peter out as the context changes.

I'm careful to not rely too heavily on VC funded open source whenever I can avoid it.

I like your interface for switching between the backgrounds and having a small panel to tweak the parameters. I played around with procedural patterns using SVG/canvas/webgl a while back and this makes me feel like re-packaging the way it's represented.

Thanks, I've designed a few UIs for manipulating graphics and spent a few tries iterating and improving this one in particular. There was a need to show as much background as possible, sometimes the limitations lead to some creative choices. I'm quite pleased how it came out myself.

It's probably vibe coded, but also, it's next.js

I can't remember the exact phrasing, but I read somewhere long ago that what you read now, you become in 5 years from now. As in, right after reading something, you think and deliberate about it, but in 5 years from now that becomes part of your subconscious and you can't activity filter it.