After quite some time of inactivity (eg day-work) I revived this almost abandoned blog as test-case for playing with 2025 AI coding tools.

My problem:

as many blogs, the gaps between new articles became so long, that often needed to evolve the already minimal blog implementation.

I realized that it took more time to upgrade hugo and adapt to the changes than the time I spent on writing actual content.

Hence claude-code was a rather welcome and capable help to deal with these boiler-plate changes:

  • simple: I do not use twitter / X anymore but moved to mastodon

    claude$ can you change social coordinates in my blog?

This is a simple config change, but typing the request into a simple terminal line is still a very different way of coding than only a few years ago (eg google/stack-overflow, edit, debug, deploy).

Together with the nice emacs package claude-code-ide.el this can all take place without a single open source-code buffer. Similar as with to human coding partners - a small, but relevant set of questions about the task goals and alternative implementations options asked by the tool helps to gain confidence.

Even more convincing (even if not strictly required) is watching the log of actions and applied changes, detected problems and found fixes. Watching this exposes the intricate beauty of watching someone else working - and must inspire the rather subjective experience of increased efficiency that is reported by many. Probably similar to the fullfilling experience of watching an experienced Japanese swordmaker on youtube doing work you would neither be able (nor usually be required) to do. Hopefully the loss of efficiency by people watching reels will be compensated by the gain in efficiency by coders - but I might be diverging…

Next, and slightly more challenging (at least for me)

  • not so simple: the configuration of the blog theme, color scheme, the embedded source code boxes and the feature images had evolved over almost half a decade.

    claude$ can you upgrade hugo and theme and fix those backward incompatible changes?

  • unstructured: it is quite some time ago that I moved from Wordpress to Hugo.

    claude$ maybe there is a better hugo theme or workflow from emacs org-mode to implement a simple blog today in 2025?

Claude code (eg as claude-code-ide in emacs) was quite useful to achive all above goals without forcing me to learn too much about syntactical changes on the hugo side. It also kept me successfully from migrating into yet another technology, but suggested small changes to my org workflow (small mods to the org template for new posts).