Charles' Web World

Introduction

If you are reading this it is likely that you have already begun to experience the final form of this project, that being this website. And so I welcome you to my portfolio and Charles’ Web World.

Project Goals

1. Finish with a clean and functional website.
2. Understand techniques and proper utilization of AI tools.
3. Come to terms with my own existential being as a new engineer in the contemporary era.

Testing the Water

Normally when I get myself into a project there are some planning stage patterns that stand out. These will quickly become goals and principles that I use as a foundation in any further development or planning. You may notice that the Project Goals here seem rather abstract. Perhaps you are even thinking that it’s not nearly strong enough to be very helpful in any difficult decision making. As the one that got to experience the process I would fully agree with that statement. The issue is that prior to the planning stage I was in doubt and after the planning stage I was overtaken by nervous dread. So what happened? How had I gone off the rails before getting started?

This started as many of my projects start. A sudden thought in the middle of a conversation with my father. We had been talking about the uses of AI in education and workplaces. Neither of us are especially fond of either the implications or concept of AI so you would understand my surprise when he recommended that I learned how to use it. In truth I felt a bit like Will Smith in I, Robot visiting his mother only to find she had gotten a humanoid robot. Despite the mild betrayal his explanation made sense. He had just begun reading The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming and mentioned that every seventeen years or so the knowledge needed to be proficient in a given field doubles. Historically to keep up with such knowledge demand people have come up with a variety of tools to assist them. His description of AI wasn’t a replacement of engineers nor of their specialized skills but another tool to beat the curve.

So I began fully planning on starting the project using AI and then giving up on it when it failed.

This did not happen.

Planning

A website is an experience. Anyone who has had the pleasure of exploring most American university websites knows how much that can make or break a website. It was important for me to have a strong visual style and smooth transitions to feed into a truly unique and memorable website. So I approached this as I would a pen and ink art piece beginning with a sketch to get a good vibe of placement and proportions. This can be seen below scribbled on a page of green engineering paper.

The written idea is only half of the battle during the planning process. For one I needed to find an AI capable of programming a website. Then once I had obtained pandoras box I would have to learn to open it. After talking to some people who use AI in a Healthy workflow, I settled on Claude code.

It was time to test Claude: Visit The Vine

Honestly, I was pretty impressed. And this is where the dread began drifting in. Mostly caused by the fact that in intentionally attempting to make it fail, the results got better. Was this field dying out?

No, no it was not.

That being said there was a significant moment of worry. That isn’t to say I didn’t learn anything. When I started using it I described broad strokes, my tone very relaxed and polite. When bugs would occur I would describe the bugs and become very analytical, offering possible reasons for the behavior. I noticed that as my tone shifted and changed so did Claude’s. In fact there was a noticeable change in Claude’s strengths based on the style of language I used. Below I have included a table of the ways I learned to communicate with Claude.

Style	Style Description	Strength
Mentor	Acting as a teacher or coach to Claude answering questions and talking it through problems	Fixing Bugs
Director	Assumes that Claude is proficient and effective coder so that one simply tells Claude what to do in “Broad Strokes”	Simple General Changes
Poet	Imagine telling Claude a story with characters and environment to then give Claude the ability affect the characters	Graphics

Something interesting I noticed when speaking to Claude is that the “energy” you give is the “energy” you get. When I act as a mentor Claude also acted as a student. As I was the director it became an actor. I the poet, Claude the philosopher.

Harnessing the Little Control I Still Have

Neither doubt nor dread inspire good decisions. Yet I still had a website to build and a tether to create. It was important to me that I retained my artistic control. I used Blender to design both the rose and the proceeding stems. The shader is inspired by a classic manga style however the lights and darks are inverted. This means that rather than using dots to suggest shading, this shader uses dots to suggest light. The dots are created by a voronoi texture and the outline is implemented with a fresnel texture. To differentiate what spots should be light and dark a diffuse shader is plugged into a color ramp. Then using a color mix node the different regions can be differentiated.

The rose and petals use a slightly different configuration but the same principles. The diffuse shader routed into a colour ramp splits the rose into four separate regions. The regions are changed into their different shades of red. This is fed into a colour mix node that uses a fresnel texture to either the reds or black.

I had all of the images and shaders finished but the art piece could still not be assembled. I needed a story not only to help my interaction with Claude, but more importantly to create an environment that would linger in the users mind. So I sat down and wrote; enter Charles the rose. Charles lived in simulation run in a cold war era lab as part of an End of the World Survival program. As they attempted to find a way for humanities survival, Charles witnessed his world bend and collapse over and over and over again. As the lab shut down Charles was moved and somehow found his way to the internet. His world is still unstable and if you watch carefully you can see the signs of a shattered world.

Does THIS Really Count as Programming?

So my little world of complete control left as soon as it came. Yet I could not stop as I had some dread to overcome. I won’t talk about the coding process as it was almost entirely written by Claude. Rather I’d like to talk about my apprehensions for the use of AI.

To quote my brother-in-law we need to learn “how to use ai without ai using us”. It’s an almost humorous phrase if there wasn’t so much truth to it. Even in my vine test I felt an odd pull to continue applying it to everything I touched. I find this terrifying in a rather Lovecraftian way. In some way when one uses AI they surrender their mind to a machine. Now that’s not necessarily always true but the addictive pleasure of calling to the void and grasping material from seemingly nowhere is something to be mindful of. I truly believe that an over reliance on AI will slow and damage our minds.

My next thought is what I will affectionately coin as the Victor Frankenstein Quandary. Frankenstein despite its tragedy is one of my all time favorite stories. Victor Frankenstein while creating the creature is so incredibly focused on his work that he loses sight of the big picture. It’s not till the creature breathes that Victor sees the result of his work. This dominos into a series of several tragic events that aren’t important to this quandary. I worry that with the use of such a powerful tool we’ll get tied into the details and lose track of the big picture. That being said even after the success of Victor’s creation he abandons it. The progression of AI is not going to stop, and if we attempt to ignore its progression we fall into a similar pitfall. Thus the dilemma truly reveals itself. We cannot be quick to use AI, but we cannot disregard its weight.

I don’t think I am the only one who can see that the code produced by AI especially in large code bases isn’t very good. It lacks the experience and perspective that many engineers bring to the industry. That isn’t a way of saying it isn’t useful but without people what is it all for? A wrench is just another piece of metal without someone who could use it. It was important for me to reframe and realize that this is a way to give me more time to learn and refine myself. The better thinker I am the better this tool can help me, the more I rely on it the more I lean into mediocrity. How does one view the contents of Pandora’s box without unleashing it?

Signing out,
Simon Caisse