yjsoon

• You can just do things (or, new blog engine!)

  20 Aug, 2025

  Over the last 3 days, I redid my personal website / blog. I got Claude Code (and some other AI pals, like OpenAI Codex and Warp) to:

  • Guide me through exporting from WordPress to Astro
  • Import a bunch of posts that I wanted to keep, archiving the rest
  • Download and set up the AstroPaper theme
  • Tweak various things to my liking, including getting it to recommend colour themes similar to my old site
  • Set up various features, like a lightbox and gallery I saw online
  • Find, import, and tweak an SVG icon for Threads
  • Guide me through deployment to GitHub Pages

  If I tried this without AI, my efforts would probably have stalled fairly early on! I know for sure I wouldn’t have been able to get this done, in my free time, in just 3 days.

  That’s what’s been so remarkable about AI-assisted coding for me: the ability to just… type things out, and… have them happen. And so. Quickly. This nonsensically fast feedback loop is extremely addictive, and makes me want to keep tinkering and making.

  Pete Steinberger (using Astro too, with the same theme) captures this feeling well in his blog post, “Just One More Prompt”:

  Yes, you can just do things. That’s the beauty and the problem. Once you realize how powerful these agents are - this realization that you can finally build everything you ever wanted to build. All these ideas and side projects that you’ve been thinking about for years, but never had the time to do.

  Anyway! New blog is at yjsoon.com (in case you’re reading this from the RSS feed, which my AI assures me still works). I’ll be cross-posting on LinkedIn, so you can follow my hand-written em-dashes there if you’d like :)

  Now, I just noticed from the link preview on LinkedIn that the OpenGraph image needs replacing, so back to Claude Code it is…

  

• Warped

  19 Aug, 2025

  Today, I accidentally brought down our self-hosted instance of Canvas LMS on a Hetzner server, and couldn’t get it running again (and didn’t want to bother Rui Yang, the talented young intern-at-the-time who set it up).

  So I sicced the Warp terminal / AI agent on it, telling the AI “Fix this ridiculous thing!!” and, shortly afterwards, “PLEASE DO NOT RUN ANY DB MIGRATIONS!!!!” (because that was in the plan it cooked up), then I went to take a bus to my next appointment.

  When I reached my destination, I logged in to check, and 20+ docker compose ups and downs and 200 Warp credits later (less than 1/10 of a US$15 subscription), my LMS was back online. We are truly living in the future.

  

  Anyway if you download it with my referral link I get a free… theme? Awesome.

• Application for professional slopper

  4 Aug, 2025

  🔥 It’s not just fascination — it’s an obsession. 🔥

  Lately, I’ve been on a journey (yes, a journey 🚀) to write like AI. Not just write with it — write *like* it.

  This means:
  💥 Starting every post with a high-impact one-liner.
  🏑 Using em-dashes — this punctuation, “—” — as many as four times — in a single sentence!
  🔄 Not just stating things outright — starting with the negative, then escalating into hitherto unparallelled levels of hyperbole.
  🤡 Using emojis as bullet points.
  ✅ Leaving **all kinds of Markdown** in my posts accidentally when copying and pasting.
  🗺️ And — of course — calling everything a journey.

  It’s not just about automation.
  It’s about amplifying impact.
  It’s about unlocking potential.
  It’s about showing up authentically while sounding completely manufactured. 🤖💡

  Am I the problem? Possibly.

  Will I stop? Not until I’ve crafted the perfect post that’s not just content – it’s connection.

  #LinkedIn #AIWriting #Authenticity #JourneyNotDestination #UnlockYourVoice #CraftingImpact #Hashtags #Hashtag #Writing #Slopping

  (Sorry.)

• Sibeh awesome! Committed!

  1 Jul, 2025

  Since my last post, I’ve settled on Claude Code for AI coding. Pedagogical questions aside, I seriously have not had this much fun playing with new tech for a while. My Git commit history is currently filled with random side projects I’ve put off for years, which I now “work on” in between classes. It’s exhilarating, and the exciting part is how fast the tech —* are growing.

  

  (I got tired of Claude telling me “You’re absolutely right!”, so I told CLAUDE.md to respond in Singlish.)

  * Unfortunately, I also now have to use two single-dashes instead of my favourite em-dash to not sound like AI. Screw you, AI!

• Early vibe coding thoughts

  4 Mar, 2025

  Some thoughts on coding with AI (or, that awful, awful name, “vibe-coding”):

  It’s my kid’s PSLE year*, and I got bored of reading spelling words to him.

  So I thought, why don’t I write an app for that?

  45 minutes later, I had something fully-functional — not because I’m fast, but because I used Cursor (pictured). AI coding tools like Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and Windsurf can help programmers write full code, in-editor, soaking in the full context of the existing codebase.

  

  This is different from “asking ChatGPT” because of the in-editor and full-context parts. In the “bad old days” of… 1 year ago, I’d have had to copy my code over to ChatGPT, give the AI context about what language and framework I was working with, get some code back, and hope that the generated code was easy enough to just plug back into my codebase somewhere. So much cognitive overhead!

  This new tech, however, is remarkable; I really just ask for a feature, get the code inserted into my project. I check if it works, request some modifications, and repeat the process. AI researcher/influencer Andrej Karpathy calls it vibe coding:

  I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it. I “Accept All” always, I don’t read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.

  This is mind-blowing, and poses all kinds of new and frightening questions for programming educators. For my Swift Accelerator app development class in particular, I realised that the app I “made” in 45 minutes was comparable to what they’d take 2 weeks to struggle through. Wouldn’t it be better for students to have a working product quick, and then iterate on it? We could just teach students the basics, then get them to “vibe-code” their way to awesome apps.

  I posed this thought to my co-instructors at Swift Accelerator Jia Chen and Sean — both former students, from the first batch in 2018 — and I was surprised at the vehemence of their feedback. They worry about:

  • How it’ll degrade the students’ learning
  • Students generating code they might never understand
  • AI generating the wrong code
  • How it just changes what the class is.

  All valid points! But I wonder about students who fall behind in my class — would this help engage them more? The feeling of creating something so quickly with AI can’t be understated. Then again, I do acknowledge it’s short-cutting the hard work of comprehension, understanding, and perhaps creativity that comes with “manual” programming.

  I don’t have any answers yet, but for this year’s class, I’m intending to take a couple of groups with which to run this experiment.

  * Positive vibes appreciated. Kiddo knows about Perplexity and he knows the AI is great at finding answers from specific questions from specific practice papers — a power he’s abused to spend more time playing video games. Gahh!

Further back in time

• 3 Dec, 2024

  One Million Checkboxes
• 1 Sep, 2024

  Happy Teachers' Day
• 1 Jun, 2024

  Code in Place
• 4 Jan, 2024

  A moving story*
• 2 Jan, 2020

  2020 Vision