Claude and AI summaries

As it so happens, I started a full time job again and the side projects got sidelined...

Still, I've kept fedistats running all the time, doing emergency maintenance work from time to time, like the disk running full because I forgot to delete all intermediate files. I won't lie, I thought to shut fedistats down several times. Then again, having something deployed that is constantly running is a nice thing to have.

I'll also be honest and admit that fedistats has close to no users (apart from all the crawlers). The people who follow the fedistats account on mastodon are one group, and then the 25 or so subscribers to the AI News feed.

The world has changed dramatically in terms of technology since I started fedistats. ChatGPT was maybe 6 months old, and now we're seeing AI almost everywhere. In retrospect, the very conservative approach that fedistats took, relying on tags and pure statistics, seems almost archaic in comparison.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine strongly suggested that I started to look into coding agents. Multiple times. The funny thing about me and AI is that while AI was the thing that got me interested in computer science in the first place, I was very critical when LLMs came around, mostly because I absolutely hated the hype around the whole topic.

But still, he persisted, and about two weeks ago I downloaded Claude Code and gave it a try. The first thing on my urgent to do list for fedistats was to migrate from sendgrid to mailgun because sendgrid was removing their free tier. And believe it or not, Claude did the whole thing in a couple of minutes. It took longer for me to configure the DNS entries for mailgun correctly and fix a configuration error.

The next thing was to stop loading the fontawesome icons from their CDN, as my traffic quota started to be used up by the first week of the month (thanks to all the crawlers, certainly not because of the users 😅). I asked Claude what needs to be done, and it looked good, and the whole matter was done in a few minutes. What really blew my mind was that Claude also changed the sentence on my privacy page to indicate that I'm no longer downloading data from their CDN.

So the first customer facing change I did was to use Gemini to create a small introduction to the daily newsletters. This was an idea I already had a long time ago, but then again, I never got around to take the time to figure out how to deal with all those APIs. Thanks to Claude, it was a matter of an hour including some experimentation on the prompt and so on. So from now on, if you follow the AI News mailing list, you'll get not just Bob, but a couple of other personalities. Let me know what you think!

More changes:

• I removed the Twitter buttons everywhere. Twitter is gone!
• I made the posts to on the fedistats account public, so that people can also boost them and they have more visibility.

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If you want to learn more about my journey and the fediverse, follow me on Bluesky or on Mastodon, or follow fedistats on Mastodon.