Comment by sillysaurusx
9 hours ago
I spent about a year copying pg’s site: https://github.com/shawwn/pg
Result: https://shawwn.github.io/pg/
If you think it’s easy, it’s not. The closer you want it to be pixel perfect, the exponentially harder it is to get right.
https://www.paulgraham.com/copy.html
I’m very proud of it. I had to dig through decades-old viaweb templates to figure out which one he used.
Given the CLAUDE.md, you slopped it, so yes, it was easy. Don't take this as combative but.. if anyone has a right to be proud, it's Anthropic, you just paid them to make this for you.
Gosh hacker news is so disappointing nowadays. You show a project, you say hey, this is hard, I’m proud of it, and someone comes along and tells you that ackshually it was easy because you used a few prompts.
You have no idea. Try to redo what I did if you think it’s easy. No looking at my solutions either.
"You slopped it" should be bannable. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the author is wrong, it does nothing to further the conversation, and it’s a criticism that can be leveled at literally any project that isn’t concealing the fact that they’ve used AI when everyone uses AI now except for artisan work.
Go on, I dare you to try to redo what I did. You won’t even know where to start, since I had to buy a book from the 2000s on Viaweb and implement templates based on the contents. Now kindly leave me alone.
Why did you do this?
It was fun, and I like a challenge. I enjoy Lisp, and I retracing pg’s steps was gratifying.
Today most things are complex, and they don’t last very long. I wanted to pick apart something that’s lasted since the birth of the internet. Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.
> Viaweb was, after all, the first web application.
According to pg who is an unreliable narrator at the best of times.
I'd say Navisoft[0] might be a better candidate.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaviSoft
In the age on LLMs it's definitely way easier than what you did.
No, it’s not. I used LLMs. It was still hard as fuck, and LLMs can’t actually help you when you’re trying to reproduce someone’s graphical design (specifically the pg buttons).
If you think it’s easy, or even possible without investing months, I invite you to try.