Comment by elliotec
3 hours ago
Thanks for taking a look! Yeah, these programs are very new and pretty uncommon (for now).
As for why I chose Rails - I just know Rails really well. I've been using it since 2012 or so, and it's basically muscle memory now. The most intensive parts of the app really would lend themselves to Python tooling and I did end up hand-building a lot of the data engineering stuff that there for sure exist plugins for in Python, but the trade off of using what I know well outweighed that by a lot. Plus the rest of it are perfectly CRUD-able server-rendered pages. Pretty Railsy aside from the data eng stuff.
I also started this before AI coding harnesses were available. I shelved it for a long time after the initial few rounds, but the work I did in the beginning was substantial enough to not just start over. If I had Claude Code with Fable when beginning, it might look a lot different. But I do like knowing everything about what I built and understanding every line.
On your AI ethics question... I do think it's possible, eventually. That's why I hedged a bunch on it being a long term goal. If open weight models gain steam and hardware acquisition becomes manageable, it would be a dream to run a self-hosted self-trained model in my house (which is powered by solar, so the renewable thing is real). It is especially realistic if some funding comes through for hardware.
Cool, that makes sense. Did you use AI to help build it when you picked it back up?
Also, any plans to include trip/experience reports? I'm particularly curious about experiences regarding meditation and dreams and that side of what you have in the project. I know there are places like Erowid and whatnot for psychedelic reports but haven't heard of something similar for the rest of what you have in here.
Yeah I’ve used mainly Claude code and recently kimi with pi for dev. Honestly the vast majority of features and improvements happened in the last few months with AI enablement. The Fable fake-outs really pushed me to optimize my time with it.
On experience reports - I decided to keep it purely academic at first but will soon be working on integrating data from a tool by Josie Kins (the maker of https://effectindex.com).
I also don’t know of anywhere that aggregates reports from meditation and dreams etc, but that’s a really interesting idea. Maybe this can be the place!