I Won the Internet
Okay, I placed in a vibe-coding web design contest sponsored by Unstoppable Domains.
tl;dr—A nice thing just happened. For technical details, keep reading.
I have a Web3 domain. If you launch the Brave browser and navigate to franklin.brave, it will resolve to a file on the Interplanetary File System, hereafter IPFS. Unlike typical domain names, which you rent from a registrar, I purchased franklin.brave as an NFT. I own it, and the file I uploaded to the IPFS may be very difficult for a hostile actor to take down.
The business from which I bought the token is Unstoppable Domains. UD hosted a vibe coding contest to use their AI-driven website design utility, which appears to connect to the Sonnet model at Claude, and post the results somewhere. I came in second place. The site is here.
I think the AI did a great job on this. The design is handsome and professional. I had to tweak some of the copy. I also fed the code into my Claude account to fix a few minor errors. But UD’s coding assistant got me 95% there, in a half hour. (I spent another two hours closing the remaining 5%, and uploading my first Web3 site was a learning experience. But the next time I do this, those will not be challenges.)
People are fretting about LLMs, and not unreasonably. But they’re just tools. They amplify your inclinations. If you’re dishonest and lazy, and you’re phoning in a book review for The New York Times, the tools will produce accordingly. If you’re curious, courageous, and tasteful, they’ll help you in ways that may surprise you.
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death by Laura Cumming. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The next exhibition in the Dissident Museum is Suddenly, A Tree Appeared: Three Comics Artists Look at the Landscape.
Sweet. I think these tools live in a very big blind spot for a lot of artists. There's an understandable impulse to conspicuously curse anything AI. I presume it's largely to signal solidarity with artists currently working in services (who will face some difficult career pivots). But, with the other edge of the blade, there's just so much potential to automate administrative drudgery around a practice, and even to express a vision in new ways and at new scales.
This was coded with Claude assistance also. It's a procedural system for one of the motifs that won't stop following me into my dreams and nightmares: https://pacificcrestgothichorror.com/
Tried the Brave browser (looks a lot like Edge tbh) and dig your site, especially the fun little cursor.
It's really too bad that for about 5 years (2000-2005?) websites were actually getting really cool! All kinds of amazing interactivity and interesting layering was getting built into sites, even some of the corporate ones. Communication Arts (also sadly gone with NO replacement equivalent at all) even had a category around web-interactivity to their yearly survey of "Best of Design". And then... I dunno, it just dried up.
Glad you added in the little flourish on yours!