I don’t know why it suddenly dawned on me, but i’m not sure why i chose to build Z1NZ0L1N and Architypes with a full-fat CMS. I’d been using Pelican and Hugo for almost fifteen years by that point, so i’ll chalk it up to some sort of static site generator fatigue. It took me more than a year to remember why i abandoned CMSes in the first place: they have pretty much every feature that i need… and a lot i don’t.

Ghost isn’t a bad CMS, but i don’t want to turn my audience “into a business”. I don’t need integrated analytics, a newsletter engine, a clunky attempt at federation, and reminders to adopt “content distribution tactics” to get more people to discover my work and increase engagement. If i’m using a CMS, though, i’d like to be able to manage my uploads in a media library and to organize my content with more than a single taxonomy. I guess those features aren’t shiny enough for the tech bros who Ghost is trying to lure away from Substack and Medium.

Going back to Hugo means losing Ghost’s editor, but i’m writing in iA Writer anyway. The thought of having to set up compilation and deployment scripts might seem daunting, but it’s a one and done deal. I’ll never be bothered by useless features any more, i’ll shape the medium around the content, and best of all, i’ll be able to get back to Infomaniak’s excellent – and cheap – shared hosting.

In the past, that kind of endeavour might have taken me a few evenings and weekends, but thanks to Claude Code, it was over in a few hours. I can’t say that porting templates, converting HTML to Markdown, grepping files and renaming folders is fulfilling work. If Claude ends up being nothing more than a glorified regex generator, then it’ll already be transformative. That’s plumbing alright, but plumbing is vital, and i’d rather do anything else with my limited time on this rapidly warming planet.

I just wished it’d be more predictable, more coherent, more… careful. These tools reflect the “let’s throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” ethos of their creators, and each throw costs more money and more CO₂ than i’m willing to waste. I can’t wait for the bubble to burst, not because i want the tech bros to suffer (that’s just a nice bonus), but because we need to sort the features from the hype, and figure out how these tools can consistently serve their users.

That being said, i can’t help but be amazed by the result. It’s telling that Claude sailed through the template conversion, but choked on the content formatting. Machine language is easy, human language is hard, even for – especially for – machines that pretend to be human.

Links

“Craft is not culture” by Naz Hamid. “Culture is the moat. It’s not craft and it’s not aesthetic. […] LLMs can pattern-match around culture, but they cannot be inside it. They cannot live it.” Trouble is, there’s no culture without craft. Our current deskilling is our future deculturation.

“Last.fm is now independent”. More wonderful news.

Music

‌Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis. Miles Davis would have been 100 years old this week. The tribute albums are pouring in, starting with 100 Miles for Miles Davis from Jason Miles, the synth programmer on Miles Davis’s last three albums. But there’s nothing like going back to the source — and if i have to choose, Sketches of Spain is my favourite Miles Davis record, with its haunting arrangement of the Concierto de Aranjuez by Gil Evans. This week also witnessed the death of Sonny Rollins, who was only four years younger than Miles Davis, at the grand old age of 95. You can feel the passage of jazz history.

Movies

Good Omens: The Finale by Rachel Talalay. Is it a single-episode season of a TV show? Is it a movie? I guess it doesn’t matter that much. Terry Pratchett spent his career celebrating human life in all its messiness. The Discworld series and Good Omens were fantastic tales, just like the tales we tell ourselves to give meaning to our lives, tales full of joy and hope and passion and creativity. Aziraphale, Crowley, and, most of all, Adam Young were supposed to prove that predestination isn’t destiny. Left to its own devices, Neil Gaiman decided that everyone – including Jesus! – could be flicked out of existence by a caprice of the gods. “I guess you don’t matter that much”: tell me you’re a sexual predator without telling me you’re a sexual predator.