Home page woes

Today I had an object lesson in why I need to supervise my workflow.

I've been making updates around the site, as one does, and realized that Vale wasn't running on my home page or portfolio site. I inquired of Claude Code as to why, and it said that those pages were .tsx files, which Vale ignores.

Mind you, I hadn't asked it to make them .tsx files. It just did it. So I asked if there was any reason they shouldn't be .mdx files. It said there wasn't, so I had it change them to .mdx. That way Vale would review them.

No biggie, right?

Well, today I checked the home page again, and lo and behold, there was a new sidebar on it. Grr.

Turns out that when Claude Code changed the home page to .mdx, Docusaurus did its thing and added a sidebar.

Now, a human knows at a glance that is wrong. My robot minion, of course, did not.

So I had it change the home page back to .tsx and all was well.

The moral of this story, and the point of the exercise of building and using an AI-assisted workflow, is to find these stumbling blocks and identify them.

Right now, this POC site is about the smallest use case you could realistically imagine for a production system. It's dead simple: a portfolio site plus a blog. Small things compound — and the earlier you find them, the easier (and cheaper) they are to fix.

Now take this site and multiply it exponentially, pages and problems, to extrapolate what an enterprise production system will look like. How much planning, training, and supervision will that take?

Scary, no?

This is why we practice. This is why we test. This is why we iterate.