Well, this has been fun so far…
I wasn’t really sure if I’d ever make a khelbenmortis.com, but I guess here we are. Ever since building the Kasino, the breadth of what has been accomplished in the overall stream-related side project thus far makes it seem as though it’s taken a lot longer than it actually has. It’s definitely been a lot of work, but I never lose sight of the fact that doing this without the tremendous AI tools at my disposal that, while possible, surely would’ve taken me years of trial and error that I definitely don’t have the spare time to donate to a silly thing like this.
But that’s actually been a huge relief for me from a creative perspective. As I’ve always said, doing creative things is a significant component of what comprises me overall happiness in day-to-day life. While I prefer to be working on things like writing or making music, those types of projects have increasingly gotten away from me as the shackles of real-life and the criminally low number of hours we have each and every day begins to be consumed largely by efforts to stay financially above water. There’s plenty of AI haters out there and there is a bit of a misguided perception out there that it is some sort of powerful tool that allows virtually anyone to do virtually anything—but this is almost wholly untrue. It’s certainly a powerful tool, and very diverse in its application, but the extent to which you can produce exactly what you want depends heavily on your understanding of how to make what you want without these tools, as well as their limitations and workflow. The fact that an average joe can plug a few prompts into a large language model and get it to write their school paper for them lends itself to a perceived notion that AI is bound to make people dumber and soon enough, nobody will know how to do anything. But this example is not ubiquitous and glosses over how much you can learn from these AI tools if you approach the project properly.
I’ve learned a ton of things from building Khelben’s Kasino because I had a strong fundamental understanding of what was possible, even if I didn’t explicitly know how to execute it. To watch Claude work through problems and decipher efficient ways to bring something to life has allowed me to learn more about JavaScript polling, web application development and port-forwarding than any other resource I’ve ever explored. It takes a great deal of the headache out of web development, largely because of its memory and its ability to produce documentation to support everything that it helps me build. These kinds of projects can be immensely complicated and if you’re not working on them constantly, it’s very easy to lose sight of where you are when you return to it several months later. Traditionally, the way to make sure you don’t lose your place when developing something in code that is complex is to keep the relevant documentation up-to-date as you work. Which is also famously the most tedious practice in the development cycle, often entirely ignored or constantly out-of-date because everyone hates doing it.
With these LLMs, so long as you’re working with them slowly and carefully throughout the process, confirming that it understands the structure and functionality of what you’re building, you can have it spit out fresh documentation every time you so much as change a text colour. This allows you to have current reference material if you should ever need to take a break from the development cycle and, I dunno, go the fuck outside once in awhile and spend some time in the real world. It sure beats trying to figure out how to optimize a computer circa 2012 with 16 months of woefully vague patch notes and a two year-old copy of ‘Windows 7 for Dummies’ in hand.
Now, some may say, this recreational roller coaster ride of pushing the boundaries of my AI tools to build a fully-fledged online casino game and front-end website for my Twitch channel would surely be better spent on a community that actually had viewers. Hear, hear, nameless detractor!
A fair point, no doubt—but I don’t really make these things for other people; that’s been true of all of my creative projects, I’m certain. Sure, It’s great when someone wants to read one of my books, but the joy I take away from writing them cannot be replaced by positive feedback from others. It’s nice when people listen to the music I have recorded, but no one has listened to those songs more than I have either. It’s not a product of ego; I still remain my own worst critic, but the mere act of finishing something to a passable level of satisfaction—even if I’m internally belittling the parts that I know could’ve and should’ve been better—makes me feel alive.
To some extent, I try to incorporate this into my actual job, too. Sometimes work can be tedious and in the realm of tech support, there are no shortage of incredibly tedious “solutions” to an IT problem or boring templated methodologies for deploying hardware. To keep it as lively as I’m able, I always sprinkle in a little bit of my creative instinct into my work and it makes the day more tolerable, even though it may take some extra time. Sure, just about anyone could help a little old lady hook up their wireless printer and print a test page. But I’ll be the guy that increases the size of the text on her monitor so she don’t have to squint, asks what her favourite colour is so I can customize the visual theme of her task bar accordingly, removes every other installed virtual printer she’ll never need or know how to use, and then prints off a picture of her grandkids as a test page instead of the generic one. It’s the white glove treatment; no snooker table required.
Anyway, I think I’ve largely got the front-end of this website built and structurally, it’s got room for expansion and the fundamental integration with the Kasino is all in place. So, like all websites, it will be constantly under construction, but I’ll continue tapping away at it and do my best to make sure it never looks broken.
In fact, while I sure didn’t have to include a “blog” section, I’m sort of glad that I did, because this sort of stream of consciousness writing is also something that I didn’t know I was missing until it had been absent for so long. I needed some sort of test blog post just to see if me and my inanimate digital buddy got the style of the website correct for a blog page and I could’ve Lorem Ipsum’d the shit out of it, but now I’m kinda glad I actually wrote it instead.
The juice has been worth the squeeze!