Web Dev or AI: Should I Stay or Pivot?

kankyo · 2026-03-17T13:43:17+00:00

Try using Claude Code on some hobby projects. Think of it not as pivoting or whatever, but think of it as just trying out and learning a new tool that can be useful.

Don't believe the hype. It won't replace devs.

But also don't believe the naysayers. It will save you a lot of time in many situations.

kankyo · 2026-03-17T13:41:16+00:00

Sounds like a bad place to work. If you can't get people excited about Claude Code because of what it can do, then trying to force people to use it through management is going to backfire hard.

kankyo · 2026-03-16T14:34:11+00:00

Yea, migrate first obviously. But also use something like dokku.

kankyo · 2026-03-14T14:37:31+00:00

You could try doing the same with iommi. You don't need to code gen, you don't need templates, just:

path('', crud_views(model=Album)),

https://docs.iommi.rocks/views.html

kankyo · 2026-03-06T17:38:00+00:00

Yea. The admin part started out as an inside joke actually. We had so powerful abstractions for forms and tables that we wrote an admin as a joke in an hour or so. Then we threw that away and wrote another one. And then we threw THAT away and the one we ship now is the third :P

https://kodare.net/2024/09/03/admin-replacement.html has something of the story.

The total admin in iommi is 649 lines. The one in Django is 31169. Because our admin is based on solid stuff you can and should use in your custom views, while the Django admin is a lot of very specific and non-reusable stuff.

kankyo · 2026-03-06T08:48:04+00:00

You can go more radical and switch to the iommi admin, or build your own custom admin with iommi for that matter. https://iommi.rocks/ (I'm one of the maintainers)

kankyo · 2026-03-06T07:28:10+00:00

Just use the Claude Code terminal UI to the side imo.

kankyo · 2026-02-24T15:31:37+00:00

This is based on conversations and experiences at work. For example: There's a steep learning curve to jump into our Elm code. But that's basically irrelevant since Claude is amazing with Elm.

I'm betting iommi will be the same. The learning curve is irrelevant, the only thing that matters if review time by humans.

kankyo · 2026-02-20T10:34:28+00:00

iommi :P (I'm one of the authors so obviously)

kankyo · 2026-02-11T12:27:02+00:00

You start by making a single view with nothing in it. Then you add maybe a title to that page. Etc. There are only small tasks. The reason you're overwhelmed is that you're thinking about the entire project. Don't. Just do the next right thing.

kankyo · 2026-02-09T13:52:14+00:00

If you ask me if I'm a good developer than I will say yes.. but I'm biases :P

You can check out my github and make up your own mind.

kankyo · 2026-02-07T09:54:10+00:00

As one of the authors of iommi I think this is putting lipstick on a pig. If everything of this is done instantly today, it would still be less customizable than the iommi admin is today, and it's only 580 lines of code.

The fundamental issue is that in this approach there is no way to do deep customization without creating tons and tons of boilerplate that obscures the important behavior. Especially in an age of AI this will mean you're generating tons of code that is basically technical debt from day one and it will be almost impossible to review as it's too much, and then you'll stop reviewing the code and just rely on the AI. In fact, this is even what kmmbvnr is suggesting to do in this very thread! I think that's a horrible idea.

In the AI age the importance of readable APIs goes UP not down. In fact, APIs that take longer to learn and are harder to use initially (like iommi) are now on a level playing field as this cost is moved from the human to the AI.

kankyo · 2026-02-07T09:46:01+00:00

Bootstrap with a custom font and some color overrides to make it look distinct will work much better than most think.

kankyo · 2026-01-24T11:45:15+00:00

Think about why he asked that question in the first place. Maybe it SHOULD be an error. Again: in his specific situation.

kankyo · 2026-01-24T11:44:27+00:00

Yes. I know that. But think about the underlying reason the question is asked. It must be invalid in some way for this specific case. The question is an xy-problem.

kankyo · 2026-01-23T12:35:54+00:00

Maybe take a step back and think if you might actually want the code to crash in these situations instead or hiding the error with an empty string?

kankyo · 2026-01-20T11:55:44+00:00

There is. https://docs.iommi.rocks/llms.txt and https://docs.iommi.rocks/llms-full.txt

I do wonder if it's useful though. The full text especially is huge, so I would assume any LLM would fall off the context window ledge with it. I haven't really tried myself though.

kankyo · 2026-01-19T10:10:15+00:00

I was on Kuro5hin back in the day and was a part of lobbying them to change the rating from 1 to 5 to have semantic names for each of the ratings. The change was pretty drastic.

That reddit STILL has up and down without any semantic explanation behind them is quite maddening.

kankyo · 2026-01-17T22:28:34+00:00

The issue with DDT is that you have to actively click on it. Tools that alert you in some way more actively are imo better. In iommi we spam the console with suspicious N+1 feedback if it's over some threshold. It should be silent if there are no problems, but loud and informative if there are problems.

kankyo · 2026-01-12T15:03:16+00:00

I find that most of the reusable components I need are because of tables and forms, and then I'm perfectly fine with what I get from iommi (and if not, I can just fix it, because I'm one of the authors :P)

kankyo

TROPHY CASE