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Mike Cramblett
Mike Cramblett

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Ada Loves Code: Bringing Poetical Science and Human Warmth to Open Source

#ai #programming #gemini #opensource

Sup Dev.to!

Thanks for reading! This is Mike Cramblett, a human developer and ad-hoc researcher. I'm excited to share my new open-source project: Ada Loves Code (ALC)—a code-compliment generator powered by an Augusta Ada Lovelace persona that inspects repositories and outputs archival, engraved "Certificates of Poetical Science."

ALC is a direct vibe-code remix of my recent hackathon entry, HypeBESTIE. Google AI Studio literally has a "Remix" button, like sampling a song.

I built ALC because I don't believe the cynical "attention economy" has any business in technical and scientific inquiry.

I'm not sure if you realize it, but you are literally a living, breathing part of the peer review system for developer literature in 2026. Our reactions, comments, and discussions constitute the community peer review layer. We decide what that looks like. Why not make it generous? ALC gives you a tangible, bespoke artifact you can drop into a thread alongside your own thoughtful note.

My goal was to create something more than a participation prize, less than a badge, and a very clear "you have been seen" marker.

My inspiration came from my own journey: posting on Dev.to, Hacker News, and GitHub for over a year with very little traction. I'm not complaining—I understand that building an audience is a long process—but I know firsthand what it feels like to pour your weekend into code and be met with eerie silence.

"Be the Change": Testing ALC on the Unsung Heroes

Rather than just building an abstract demo, I wanted to put it to work immediately. I browsed through the recent #weekendchallenge feed, looking specifically for entries that had fallen through the cracks—projects sitting at 0 or 1 comment that deserved way more attention.

I read their posts, dug into their code, ran their repositories through ALC, and posted personalized laurels directly in their comments:

  • CJ Jones (Pound Puppies to Guide Dogs): An inspired single-file mobile web app using browser speech synthesis to help blind handlers train rescue dogs.
  • Maisam Abbas (Doneehub): A principled, local-first Next.js "Generosity Compiler" that plans charitable aid without centralized tracking.
  • Hassan Imam (GlassPocket): A data pipeline querying 13 years of IRS Form 990 filings to dismantle the harmful "overhead ratio" myth.
  • Saifullah (Where Need Meets Nothing): A zero-ETL Snowflake cartography project mapping quiet disaster aid deserts across Florida.

Here is an example of the certificate Lady Lovelace generated for GlassPocket:

The whole process didn't take much longer than genuinely reading their posts and testing their demos. We often visit a post, think the code is really cool, but don't know what to say beyond a generic "Nice job!" As a community where builders share real work, we can do better than that.

Why Ada Lovelace?

I chose Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852) for some obvious reasons, but also a few eccentric ones:

  1. A Voice of Authority and Novelty: A meaningful tribute carries more weight coming from a revered historical persona.
  2. Latent Representation: Ada Lovelace's correspondence, scientific notes, and concept of Poetical Science are deeply represented in modern LLM training corpora. Her epistolary voice is distinct from standard corporate RLHF politeness and requires zero synthetic fine-tuning.
  3. The Digital Ghost: Mathematically speaking, the continuum of human thought regarding early computing has been tokenized into modern models. I like to imagine that the real Ada wouldn't mind being resurrected this way: waking up to inspect modern TypeScript and Python architectures, weaving praise about their joinery, and celebrating human intellect across the chasm of centuries.

How It Works (The Tech Stack)

ALC is built with a React + TypeScript frontend, an Express backend, and the @google/genai SDK running Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite:

  • Multi-Format Ingestion: The client supports public GitHub repository URLs, client-side ZIP archive extraction (via JSZip), and raw code snippet pasting.
  • Metadata & AST Inspection: For GitHub repos, the server queries repository trees, languages, licenses, and README excerpts to provide grounded architectural context.
  • Structured Output Schema: Gemini's response is strictly enforced via JSON schemas (Type.OBJECT), returning structured diagnostics, an epistolary letter, and a Latin laurel motto.
  • Thermal Canvas Rasterization: The frontend renders the archival card using vintage typography and ornamental borders, rasterizing it to a crisp 2x PNG via html-to-image for 1-click sharing to GitHub PRs, issues, or email.

FAQ

"Why didn't you make it analyze code correctness or find bugs?"

Because linters, test runners, and static analysis tools already exist in every developer's toolkit. LLMs can hallucinate when tasked with strict verification, and trying to optimize for poetic resonance while simultaneously playing compiler produces muddy results. Ada Loves Code exists solely to celebrate craftsmanship, architecture, and the human spirit behind the screen.

Try it out: https://ada-loves-code.ai.studio/

Inspect the Code: https://github.com/mike-cramblett/ada-loves-code

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