An interesting lesson for any budding 'devs'

3d (edited) • Full Stack Development with AI

Sometimes when writting our apps with AI coding assistance we deleve into the tech. We pull out our frameworks, we load our modules and create our app.

But sometimes less is more.

This morning i found a site with a bit of functionality I wanted to replicate so I grabbed a screen image and gave it to Cursor and claude-opus-4.5. Off it went and created a 'rough' approximation. The rotating wheel was way off but i eventually got it working on Next.Js. only 480MB when expanded and installed.

That got me thinking, HTML5 is really versitile so again I asked cursor and claude-opus-4.5 to build the same thing using just HTML5 and JavaScripts. Et Voila, It did it. This time index.html and styles.css come to a whopping total of 15kb.

I then used the javascript obfuscator to obfuscate the script, just because I could.

Sometimes we over engineer because we can. AI and coding makes it really simple to get really complicatd easily. A great engineering principle is K.I.S.S (Keep It Simple Stupid!)

Heres all the code on my github - https://github.com/twelsh37/shinny-thing

Here is the Nextjs App hosted on Vercel - https://shinny-thing.vercel.app/

Here is the HTML5 on my server - https://shiny-thing.twelsh.co.uk/

Well that was Sunday morning for a few hours. Some good lessons learned, again!!!!

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