A Weekend of Motorsport and Code

This weekend it's time again for the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and this year the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix is also taking place. For a motorsport heart, there's hardly anything better.

The Idea: Away from WordPress

I've been carrying around the idea for a while of freeing my website from WordPress and instead building a really simple, self-developed solution. That way I could spare myself all the overhead. As a C# developer, PHP and Python are rather off-putting to me — admittedly a very personal opinion. Anyone who has programmed in those languages for years probably finds C# just as dreadful.

To turn the more or less pointless "driving stupidly around in circles" (as Niki Lauda once put it) into something constructive, I thought to myself: why not build something in ASP.NET Core and C# during Le Mans? Some time ago I had already started, but didn't get any further due to time constraints.

The Requirements

My ideas were deliberately kept simple:

• A simple blog with categories, but without a comment function
• A few static pages — basically a small CMS
• An admin area for data entry
• As a challenge: multilingual support
• Everything as simple as possible

Claude as a Development Partner

While experimenting, I noticed that Claude can produce quite good code and often helps more effectively with problems than a Google or Bing search. So why not bring Claude in to help?

When Le Mans started, I began with a naive prompt: "I want to build my website with .NET Core Razor. I want a very simple design and a small backend for my posts. As a backend I want MSSQL with Entity Framework. Can you help me with that?"

And off it went. Claude produced code and I could watch Le Mans in parallel. 😊

Initial Successes

The generated code was extensive and really well-suited for the start. I created a Visual Studio project, copied the code into it — and everything ran. It can't get faster than that: I had a site with blog functionality and a corresponding admin area.

Since I wasn't precise enough, I still had to adjust the namespaces. By the way, this is essential: the more concrete the specifications, the better the code becomes.

Interesting Observations

From here on it got really interesting. The longer the chat lasted, the more inconsistent the code became and the more variable the patterns Claude applied. Sometimes with ViewModels, sometimes without, sometimes services, sometimes static classes. I found that fascinating, since I had actually assumed consistent code.

But it wasn't a big problem — until after a few hours the maximum chat length was reached.

The Challenge: Chat Limits

This is where it got complicated. Unfortunately, Claude can't build on previous chats, but knowledge about already-created code would have been advantageous.

Claude Projects sounded like a solution, but neither the chat publication nor the GitHub reference worked for Claude. So I added the entire source code, file by file, to the project knowledge. In hindsight, it would have been better to start with a project right away — but this way I got to watch more Le Mans...

Development Loops and Misunderstandings

The further development went along quite quickly, except for a few loops in which Claude and I didn't understand each other. There were definitely some funny misunderstandings: when I wanted to simplify the language model and its handling, Claude immediately turned it into an entire translation system.

Sometimes he was also stubborn and absolutely refused to rebuild certain parts of the code.

Recurring Errors

It's interesting that certain errors persist stubbornly. Claude likes to use inline styles, which is fundamentally fine. However, with @media and @keyframes, he occasionally forgets the first or second @, because these have to be escaped in Razor pages.

It proved particularly difficult to reverse certain design decisions made by Claude. But in the end, everything worked out well.

Code Review with an AI Partner

At times it felt like a long code review session. I left most of the code as Claude produced it. Afterwards, however, the code still needs to be revised with regard to performance and standardization.

Conclusion

It was an entertaining experiment — especially when Claude digs his heels in on certain topics and absolutely refuses to listen to his "master." That reminds me of some of my juniors.

And Le Mans? That was very exciting too: no long safety car phases and everyone always pushing hard. The winners were Robert Kubica, Yifei Ye, and Phil Hanson — very impressive. The Austrian Richard Lietz triumphed together with Ryan Hardwick (USA) and Riccardo Pera (ITA) in a Manthey Porsche in the LMGT3 category.

A perfect weekend for motorsport and code!