It's time for the 24 Hours of Le Mans and the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix are here. For a motorsport heart, there's hardly anything better.
The Idea: Breaking Free from WordPress
I've been carrying the idea for a while to liberate my website from WordPress and instead create a simple, self-developed solution. This would save me all the overhead. As a C# developer, PHP and Python are rather off-putting to me – admittedly a very personal opinion. Anyone who has programmed in these languages for years probably finds C# just as terrible.
To turn the more or less sensible "driving around in circles stupidly" (as Niki Lauda once put it) into something constructive, I thought: Why not build something in ASP.NET Core and C# during Le Mans? I had started some time ago but didn't get further due to time constraints.
The Requirements
My ideas were deliberately kept simple:
A simple blog with categories, but without comment functionality
A few static pages – basically a small CMS
An admin area for content entry
As a challenge: multilingual support
Everything as simple as possible
Claude as Development Partner
While experimenting, I noticed that Claude can generate pretty good code and often helps more effectively with problems than a Google or Bing search. So why not get Claude to help?
When Le Mans started, I began with a naive prompt: "I want to build my website with .NET Core Razor. I want a very simple design and a small backend for my posts. For the backend, I want MSSQL with Entity Framework. Can you help me with this?"
And off we went. Claude produced code and I could watch Le Mans in parallel. 😊
First Successes
The generated code was comprehensive and really well-suited for a start. I created a Visual Studio project, copied the code in – and everything worked. It doesn't get faster than this: I had a site with blog functionality and a corresponding admin area.
Since I wasn't precise enough, I still had to adjust the namespaces. This is essential, by the way: The more specific requirements, the better the code becomes.
Interesting Observations
From here it got really interesting. The longer the chat lasted, the more inconsistent the code became and the more variable the patterns that Claude applied. Sometimes with ViewModels, sometimes without, sometimes services, sometimes static classes. I found this fascinating since I had actually expected consistent code.
But it wasn't a big problem – until after a few hours the maximum chat length was reached.
The Challenge: Chat Limitations
This is where it got complicated. Unfortunately, Claude can't build on previous chats, but knowledge of already created code would have been advantageous.
Claude Projects sounded like a solution, but neither chat publishing nor the GitHub reference worked for Claude. So I added the entire source code file by file to the project knowledge. In retrospect, it would have been better to start with a project right away – but this way I could watch more Le Mans...
Development Loops and Misunderstandings
Further development went quite smoothly, except for some loops where Claude and I didn't understand each other. There were quite amusing misunderstandings: When I wanted to simplify the language model and handling, Claude made an entire translation system out of it.
Sometimes he was also stubborn and absolutely refused to rebuild certain code parts.
Recurring Errors
It's interesting that certain errors persist stubbornly. Claude likes to use inline styles, which is basically okay. However, with @media and @keyframes, he occasionally forgets the first or second @ because these need to be escaped in Razor pages.
It proved particularly difficult to undo certain design decisions by Claude. But in the end, everything worked out well.
Code Review with an AI Partner
At times it felt like a long code review session. I left most of the code as Claude had produced it. However, in hindsight, the code still needs to be reworked with regard to performance and standardization.
Conclusion
It was an entertaining experiment – especially when Claude gets fixated on topics and absolutely refuses to listen to his "master." This reminds me of some of my juniors.
And Le Mans? That was also very exciting: no long safety car phases and everyone always pushing. Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye, and Phil Hanson won – very impressively. The Austrian Richard Lietz triumphed together with Ryan Hardwick (USA) and Riccardo Pera (ITA) in a Manthey Porsche in the LMGT3 category.
A perfect weekend for motorsport and code!
Site: piwonka.cc
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