Fall Sabbatical

No, I'm not taking a pause on my blog posts.  I'm stopping work on Slowpoke temporarily to focus on writing software for my Homeowners Association (HOA).

As with Slowpoke, this has been a project that I've pondered ever since I became a homeowner.  It's taking precedence now, because it's budget season.  While researching something else related to the HOA, I asked Gemini about the feasibility of writing bespoke HOA software for a small association.  It informed me that it was a great idea for a weekend project (yeah, right).  

Though I'm skeptical of the estimate, this is a good chance to consolidate what's an otherwise scattershot workflow for my work on the HOA.

It also gives me a chance to measure my productivity with an AI Agent vs. a site of similar functionality (aka, Slowpoke).  My stack will remain mostly the same - Astro, Svelte, Tailwind, and Cloudflare - as Slowpoke.  I feel like I've got a good grip on the stack and that my familiarity with OpenCode as an agent helps smooth over the variability of learning a lot of new technologies on the fly.

I am adding a wrinkle - I'll be using shadcn-svelte for UI components, but that should boost my productivity rather than hinder it, since the components are expected to reduce boilerplate I'd otherwise have to write.

In addition to writing the code, this gives me a chance to streamline my workflow for the agent, but I'll save that for another post, in order to force myself to write more frequently than once a week.

My goal is to crank this site out in 80 hours or fewer.  This is no small feat given that I'm only partially sure of the requirements.  As of now, I'm sitting at about 3.25 hours after some research, creating an upload component for bank statements, and (mostly) working through a forced upgrade of the AI agent.  

I could argue that upgrading the agent isn't actually part of the project, but it's tough to be a chef if your stove is broken and you've got customers waiting.

I also hope that with a smaller project, my blogging on the topic will be more focused.

Until next time, my human and robot friends.