I didn’t mention it at the time, but the “Hubble expansion” web page I made in this post was using AI:
It worked almost perfectly right off the bat using this prompt with claude.ai:
I want to make a visualization of Hubble expansion in HTML. The background should be a collection of random red dots fixed in place. In the foreground, but transparent, so that you can still see the red dots, should be a collection of blue dots. The blue dots should be in the same place as the red dots, except moved to be 10% farther from the center. It should be possible to slide the foreground around using the mouse.
It had one bug, which was arguably a bug in my prompt, and which I fixed trivially. However, I did ask it to fix it on its own:
That’s great! It’s almost perfect. The one bug is that when you drag it around, it snaps back to the original 0, 0 centering. I would like it to stay in the new dragged position. I was able to fix the bug myself, but I would like to see your fix for it.
Worked perfectly after that. I did fiddle with the star size/count a bit, but that’s the kind of thing you only know after looking at it. Its default was actually fine on its own.
It would have taken me ~2 hrs to do this since I’m a little rusty with JavaScript. This took under 5 minutes.
AI is amazing for quick things that you want to whip up but that just aren’t quite the mental effort to do yourself.