I code all day at work using Claude. Sure, sometimes its by hand, but a lot of it is LLM.

The closest I get to doing something manual is when I’m using tools like nano to edit configs, making small adjustments or doing some random ssh’ing around my house machines.

Writing specs, Claude. Figuring out research, Claude. Skimming Youtube videos, Gemini. PR reviews, Copilot.

The list goes on. I’m always on LLMs. And to be real, this isn’t to say that I don’t refine the work through iteration or touch ups. It’s just that we’re all leaning into the tool to see what it can or can’t reasonably do.

These words are really written by me though.

The point is, I need to code simple things to keep myself sharp. So today, May 5th, I’m going to actually code a small react component by hand. No tab completions, no help.

Coding is something I enjoy doing. But today, I have to pick a smaller project. Something I can explore and get done in an hour or so.

The gallery component for this blog sucks.

I think I found something as I was browsing this very site.

I’m gonna work on said gallery today because that’s what I need to do and I can do it without looking things up too much.

Let’s see my AI rot.

Here’s some images from a previous post. I want each one to open in a modal if the user chooses to do so:

Took me about an hour to leisurely put the gallery, modal state, and few bits and bobs together.

Yeah. It works. Its not the best, but its also not the worst. It took surprisingly longer than I was expecting (mentally). Part of it has to do with my unfamiliarity with this code base which I’ve treated sort of as a service on its own that Claude provides me.

Do I know Tailwind CSS by heart? no.

Do I understand how the specific typography/blog content setup works within Tailwind’s Typography kit? no.

Do I understand Astro’s handling of TSX files vs Astro files in full? no.

Have I from scratch built a modal in the last 5 years? no.

All that said, the mental shift that’s happened around coding (and work too) makes things pretty uncomfortable to think about. While what I made is fine (not great), it proves that I need to keep my mind sharp through coding on the regular.

More human code coming soon!