For Saturday's Sharepiece, I made a proof-of-concept tool for my Eleventy-based PKMS, which is what runs dsriseah.com. I already have a command line utility that creates/modifies the various documents, but directory management is a pain in the butt. This proof-of-concept tool is designed to help with that.
What Does It Do?
I have been using Claude Code as my preferred AI assistant, which runs in a terminal window and can access context directly from your code editor, which in my case is Visual Studio Code (VSCODE). I like this a lot better than tools that use a custom version of VSCODE (e.g. Cursor) or add an interface panel that is invariably poorly designed (e.g. Augment). Claude Code, by comparison, is its own environment and uses a fairly slick Terminal User Interface (TUI). I got to wondering how hard it would be to write something similar.
So, I asked Claude Code to listen to me input a spec and I used it to generate a janky technical proof-of-concept that handled:
- creating a local extension written in Typescript that could be loaded by VSCODE only for a specific project
- using a "hot reload" module architecture so I didn't have to keep recompiling the main extension body
- did simple "close all folders / open specific folder" operations
- listened for CLI commands using a websocket server
It sort of works, but there's a lot of cleanup to do. The TUI is awful, but I can build on it. Eventually, I'll port the old command utility to this, and have something that's genuinely nice to work with. The README provides more detail about how it works.
Check out the Source Code
This is also the first time I'm using Codeberg, a not-for-profit company that has been getting buzz as the developer community grows increasingly leary of Microsoft's stewardship of Github. I've hosted the extension code for study here:
- codeberg.org/dsriseah/dsriseah-garten-bridge
Eventually I'll fork my PKMS setup into a stand-alone project for others to build on, but that is probably quite far into the future.
Sharepiece Evaluation
As I wrote in yesterday's post, I'm hoping to get back in the habit of daily posting about stuff I'm designing or building. There are three criteria which I'll note below:
EVALUATION
. lightly scoped: CHECK
. can see or hold: CHECK
. easily shared: CHECK
ALL CRITERIA PASS
This sharepiece will likely appeal only to other Eleventy or Visual Studio Code nerds who like the idea of a custom CLI tool. While it's very rudimentary, it does have enough in it to work as boilerplate for further explorations. There's an enormous amount of functionality exposed by the VSCODE extension API that this system could be useful for exploring. I designed it to be part of my PKMS, not a stand-alone extension for the Marketplace with all its publishing and packaging requirements.