Speed - when fast is too fast

With the rapid advancements of AI assistants convenience and speed sometimes can have an adverse effect. In this post I'm examining 3 use cases: Gemini "sanitising" and cleaning data, Fabric auto-extracting "wisdom" from a YouTube video and finally, how to build and publish a blog within 2 hours, from zero to hero.

The greatest time to be alive

What else can you ask for when you have the following scenario:

From the government portal I requested a report on my pension contributions so far, which resulted in a 15 page long PDF file, with some nicely formatted tables.

Since I wanted to work with these numbers, I needed a spreadsheet.

Trying to copy&paste the tables did not work (no surprise there), so I turned to AI.

Hey, Gemini, my friend! From the uploaded file can you please extract all the tabular data in a format that I can easily import into a spreadsheet? Thanks!

Oh, and I'm not interested in any other data in the file other than what's in the tables.

Cheers!

In less than a minute Gemini provided 3 clickable link referencing "sheet"-ready data. From there I jumped straight into a spreadsheet where I could flawlessly continue my data manipulations.

Huge win, not much to complain about, no negatives. Job done, time saved.

Extracting wisdom

Utilising Daniel Miessler's fantastic Fabric my jaw dropped: by simply referencing a YouTube video this framework can extract useful information without the need to watch the entire video end-to-end!

What?! Noooo waaaayyy... You're kidding me!

It provides a comprehensive summary of whatever was mentioned in the video in a structured way.

But.... is it really useful?

I mean, aren't videos created for visual consumption? Yes and no.

For some videos such a tool does not make much sense. Seriously, watching a music video is there for the visuals. Any sort of tutorial (even software tutorial) is in a video format for a reason.

On the other hand, if it's recent news, or any sort of "advice", or simply just a super long video, it's worth checking Fabric as an option.

Where it shines is that - even though you may actually watch or re-watch the video itself - you don't need to take notes, it's all done for you.

Once the summary is produced you can cherry-pick some of the bullet points you want to save for later.

Give it a go and see it for yourself: https://github.com/danielmiessler/Fabric

Disadvantages?

• some lost "context" in the sense that you no longer get all the visual clues
• you may want to fact-check!

Windsurf, Cascade, Claude Sonnet 4 & a dev blog

I've been working with these tools for a while now, mostly focusing on finishing some of my long overdue personal projects (see https://github.com/akora) but yesterday morning I just could not stop:

• I've got an idea I wanted to bring to life for a while now: a personal blog augmenting my Github projects with some background stories and some explanations in a slightly different and more colourful way that what Github can offer.

Why not create a blog?

The speed at which I was able to go from zero to hero still seems unreal.

Okay, a little bit of a "cheating":

• I've already got the domain name purchased, so that's not in the timeframe, not to worry about
• I've also got the domain managed in CloudFlare, so nothing specific to do there

But! Everything else was just in my mind: no codebase, no git repo, nothing.

The only thing I did the previous night is that I searched for some static site generator and a theme.

Okay, first I considered Ghost (and also Drupal), but honestly, for this specific project an SSG will do just fine.

I hesitated a lot about which generator to use: Hugo? Jekyll?

Researched a lot, until a came across Astro.

...and I found the theme: MultiTerm

And this is where things got crazy

Fired up Windsurf, opened a new project and literally typed this:

This is a new project. I want to build a software developer blog for myself under the domain name akora.dev using Astro (https://astro.build/) and the free theme MultiTerm (https://multiterm.stelclementine.com/). I have not decided yet where to host the site, but I have some previous past experience with Netlify.
Please help me setup the project and also create an initial documentation. Ideally, I want to have a local environment where I can configure the site and also create new posts isolated as much as possible, so that the code base becomes portable.

Pretty naive, right?

I just wanted to give it a go 😄

So, I said to the AI: GOOOOOOO!

After that point within 20 minutes I've got a locally running instance, first with some boilerplate content.

It actually took more time to clean up all the boilerplate and sample content and customise the blog somewhat than getting all the code together.

A few steps remained:

• start properly tracking it in Git
• push the code base to my local Gitea instance
• push the code base to Github
• Log in to Netlify and set up the project there
• Link Netlify with Github
• Configure the DNS on CloudFlare

All this did take no more than an hour on top of the initial setup.

Within just two hours I've got https://akora.dev/ up and running.

Is it the most beautiful and content rich site ever? No.

And that's OK. It's a start.

Do I still need to customise it? Yes, absolutely.

Still, this speed is unprecedented.

Disadvantages of this approach?

Sure:

• Did I get to know Astro inside out? No.
• Do I understand all the customisation options and limitations? No.

But this is the price I'm happy to pay, in return I got from zero to production in 2 hours flat.

What do you think?