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We’ve all been there: you catch a spark of passion for a project and start churning out work fast. Often that yields a lot of code, but not a lot of good code. Add AI agents to the mix and now you can generate a lot of garbage code—and even “test” all of it.

High output is great; it makes the bottom line look good and impresses management. But the praise evaporates when it deploys and something breaks—or worse, when it’s a pile of code that does nothing.

Just because code looks good and appears to do what you want doesn’t mean it’s actually good. So how do you toe the line?

Early on with AI, I assumed “include tests” would solve it. If there are tests, it works, right? Nope. Seriously, nope. I even had the agent create simulations; that helped, but still no dice.

When the rubber meets the road, you need to set up an environment and run the code. Run the simulation manually. That human touch—actually exercising the thing—makes the difference between fully automated text and software that truly works.

We’re headed toward a future of code generation plus manual validation. Our work will drift more into thinking and writing—not writing in the traditional sense, but prompting and observing. The time spent conceptualizing and making deliberate, iterative changes will be what separates generated slop from quality production.

IT Stuff

In order to set up the writing community software, I had to create a new subdomain and update my ddns-client software to keep the IP address up-to-date. The config file for this is in an ini format and is in my /usr/local/src directory, which can be a bit confusing since most of my other services are in /srv. That is except for routy which is even a bit more tricky.

So what is routy? It's a little reverse proxy service that @oorrwullie wrote and I helped a little. I used it to reverse back to this writing service on the domain write.pyrous.net. The code for this is in my /usr/local/src but the config file is actually in /var/routy/cfg.yaml. I always tend to forget where this is so I figured it would be good to write it down.

Software Configuration

I set up the software with a multi-user configuration. I can now use ./writefreely to add users at will. I also set it up with a Sqlite Database, which basically means it is saving to a single file on the filesystem. No biggie, it's fast enough for our needs.

Making a Backup

I realized that if multiple people are going to be adding work into this thing, I probably need to make sure their work doesn't get lost. It's all fine and dandy if I lose some work but losing someone else's work is unacceptable. My solution to this was to create a private repository in Github which I pay for a Pro License to host repositories. This repository only has one single file in it.

Great, but how do we automate the process? Cron jobs are great but instead, what about a timer? I used ChatGPT to help me work on a script for running the backup. Come to think of it, I probably should keep a copy of that script somewhere safe as well. Maybe I'll just commit it to the repo.

Edit: I have added a secret (unsearchable) gist at github to keep a copy of the script.

Final Result

We have a nice writing platform which works fairly well and has a backup system!

As I wrote week 10 newsletter to send out to the families of my students, I began to miss them dearly. The fall break has been amazing, I have spent much needed time being with my kids and husband... but I am ready to get back to growing with my students!

So, I decided to start a little writing community, of maybe just me.. oh and now my Uncle. We'll see if anyone else is interested.