pixel sorting fever dream

I rarely get sick, but when I do my brain shuts down and prevents me from being productive at all costs. Since apparently I can’t rest like a normal person I started reading Richard Hamming’s Art of Doing Science and Engineering. One of my initial takeaways is that one can just do things, and should do things.

During a rest/doom-scrolling session I came across this tweet by Paul Graham

The top answer caught my eye: A pixel sorting tool.

It seems that it was built with Cursor, and I’ve been hearing about vibe coding with AI.

So I decided to do a thing: I made pyXsort. I wanted to see if I could just “make anything”. Not a fulll-fleshed app in 20 minutes, but something over a week. It turned out I could do over a weekend. Thanks to ChatGPT I learned that PyScript exists and I could use it to make a simple web app. I also learned that I did not have to set up a server to host it, I could just use GitHub Pages. Everything would be processed on the client side. I tried prompting o3-mini-high as well as the newest 4.5 version, but neither work on the first try. I did a bit of old school Googling and saw that the call to PyScript was wrong. I fixed it with the help of a Hello World example and some trial and error. In the end I got a good-enough working app that anyone (n=3) could use.

Is it useful? No.
Is it dumb? Yes.
Is it fun? Absolutely…maybe?

I don’t know…I’m still sick, but I did a thing and it was fun and I got to learn and that was the goal so play with it if you want at https://rodriguezmdna.github.io/pixsort/: