What is project toil?

It’s the stuff in the middle of a project. The unfun stuff. Wrapping and hoisting interfaces to make 3rd part libraries fit into your programs. It’s the glue code required to render a template. It’s the stuff that is needed but not really interesting. Toil is the stuff jobs are made of.

I have outsourced the bulk of my project toil to Claude. For this blog, that means updating and converting things to yet another format. I know, I know. I should just chill and let this project be the same for some length of time > REALLY_SMALL_AMOUNT_OF_TIME.

So you may ask yourself (I know I did) … should Claude write any posts?

The answer is a big fat no but if you check the commit history you will see that it did. I may be full of contradictions, and if you read my posts you find many, but I’m okay with that.

So is writing project toil? This is, after all, a blog and this project consists of writing.

Claude for Toil

Project toil for this blog has traditionally been moving to different formats:

  graph LR
  A[HTML] --> B[Jekyll]
  B --> C[Blogstatic]
  C --> D[ASP.NET Core]
  D --> E[Hugo]

That is the toil. You can look at this post and see what I am talking about.

Ken for Writing

You can look into this repository and see my CLAUDE.md file. The contents of this file will change but right now it setup to work on this repository under Hugo. It has a writing style section. The previous post was an outline when I found it. I used Claude to complete the writing of it.

What a minute? I know I just said Claude was for the work between the writing … but I just had to try it. The results … meh (please see my previous comment about contradictions).

I will continue to use Claude for all sorts of project toil though. It converted my ASP.NET Core application to a Hugo website in a suprising low amount of prompts. There is more that needs to be done with the content and formatting. I won’t be doing that. That is toil.

The writing will still be me.