I did a thing...

... with some help from my friend Claude

10-16-2025

I have not written in this blog for a while, but this time it's for a good reason. I've been occupied with another web development-type project. I present: BlacCat.Space.

So what the hell is that about?

Glad you asked. It all started when I decided I needed to learn PHP... I know right? Nobody learns PHP anymore, one close friend called it "radical".

Reject modernity, embrace tradition

But my reasoning was that PHP, as opposed to something lide Node.js or Ruby, actually runs on any cheap shared server hosting, so I could use it to make small interactive websites, that are independent and not bloated. That is my reason behing wanting to learn PHP in general, but as for the idea for the website in particular: I was thinking, what makes social media as we know it today so toxic, so bloated, so spyware-y? What would happen and what would it looked like if you made a social site, a forum, without all of that, remove the surveillance, the data mining and gamification, and that's basically what I came up with.

And yes, I used AI to do it. There's no way I could have done it without it. And that was also part of the experiment, I wanted to see just how far I could get, I've never done a project as big and complex as that, I knew next to nothing of PHP, SQL, JavasCript, so I wanted to find out if my scarce knowledge of web development was enough to come up with a coherent project, enough that in working with the AI it did the grunt labor and I did the directing, sort of. And also check the capacity of the AI, to see if the project got too complex and we got stuck or we would be able to solve any issues that came up.

And I'm happy to say that the site is live, mostly works, Claude.AI was able to take it all the way. although I suppose I was pushing the limits with the extension of the chat (I'm using the free version) because it has gotten supper slow at the end. There were a couple of moments where I thought we were stuck, but I was able to work throught them and it was overall a great learning experience. And it still took me about a month, tho.

But it's cheating, right? I don't think so and there is a pedagogic reasoning to this project too: this helped me to see and experience the development process of a medium-size project, from start to finish, from creating the folder structure to deploying in a live web server, at the same time following a more or less professional workflow. I came up with this method as a way to bridge the gap between learner and developer and to exit tutorial hell for good. The most important part of it is that this method gave me the opportunity to see and be part of the development from a higher level, you might say, to see the big picture, as a way to learn from the general to the particular. I think too much of learning is much more focused on particular to general; that is, first learn variables, then operators, then arrays, functions, classes... and so on, and it can be months before you are able to create anything remotely useful.

But I digress... Anyway that's the rant, and there's the project, it's live and I hope some people use it.