Another itch to scratch¶
As I mentioned yesterday, I've been a happy user of Pelican for a couple or so years now, but every so often there's a little change or tweak I'd like to make that requires diving deeper into the templates and the like and... I go "eh, I'll look at it some time soon". Another thought that often goes through my head at those times is "I should build my own static site generator that works exactly how I want" -- because really any hacker with a blog has to do that at some point.
Meanwhile... I've had free access to GitHub Copilot attached to my GitHub account for some time now, and I've hardly used it. At the same time -- the past few months especially -- I've been watching the rise of agents as coding tools, as well as the rise of advocates for them. Worse still, I've seen people I didn't expect to be advocates for giving up on coding turning to these tools and suddenly writing rationales in favour of them.
So, suddenly, the idea popped into my head: I should write my own static site generator that I'll use for my blog, and I should try and use GitHub Copilot to write 100% of the code, and documentation, and see how far I get. In doing so I might firm up my opinions about where we're all going with this.
The requirements were going to be pretty straightforward:
- It should be a static site generator that turns Markdown files into a website.
- It should be blog-first in its design.
- It should support non-blog-post pages too.
- It should be written in Python.
- It should use Jinja2 for templates.
- It should have a better archive system than I ever got out of my Pelican setup.
- It should have categories, tags, and all the usual metadata stuff you'd expect from a site where you're going to share content from.
Of course, the requirements would drift and expand as I went along and I had some new ideas.
Getting started¶
To kick things off, I created my repo, and then opened Copilot and typed out a prompt to get things going. Here's what I typed:
Build a blog-oriented static site generation engine. It should be built in Python, the structure of the repository should match that of my preferences for Python projects these days (see https://github.com/davep/oldnews and take clues from the makefile; I like uv and ruff and Mypy, etc).
Important features:
- Everything is written in markdown
- All metadata for a post should come from frontmatter
- It should use Jinja2 for the output templates
As you can see, rather than get very explicit about every single detail, I wanted to start out with a vague description of what I was aiming for. I did want to encourage it to try and build a Python repository how I normally would, so I pointed it at OldNews in the hope that it might go and comprehend how I go about things; I also doubled-down in the importance of using uv and mypy.
The result of this was... actually impressive. As you'll see in that PR, to get to a point where it could be merged, there was some back-and-forth with Copilot to add things I hadn't thought of initially, and to get it to iron out some problems, but for the most part it delivered what I was after. Without question it delivered it faster than I would have.
Some early issues where I had to point out problems to Copilot included:
- The order of posts on the home page wasn't obvious to me, and absolutely wasn't reverse chronological order.
- Footnotes were showing up kinda odd.
- The main index for the blog was showing just posts titles, not the full text of the article as you'd normally expect from a blog.
Nothing terrible, and it did get a lot of the heavy lifting done and done well, but it was worth noting that a lot of dev-testing/QA needed to be done to be confident about its work, and doing this picked up on little details that are important.
An improvement to the Markdown¶
As an aside: during this first PR, I quickly noticed a problem where I was getting this error when generating the site from the Markdown:
Error generating site: mapping values are not allowed in this context
in "<unicode string>", line 3, column 15
I just assumed it was some bug in the generated code and left Copilot to work it out. Instead it came back and educated me on something: I actually had bad YAML in the frontmatter of some of my posts!
This, by the way, wouldn't be the last time that Copilot found an issue with my input Markdown and so, having used it, improved my blog.
A major feature from a simple request¶
Another problem I ran into quickly was that previewing the generated site wasn't working well at all; all I could do was browse the files in the filesystem. So, almost as an offhand comment, in the initial PR, I asked:
Can we get a serve mode please so I can locally test the site?
Just like that, it went off and wrote a whole server for the project. While the server did need a lot of extra work to really work well, the initial version was good enough to get me going and to iterate on the project as a whole.
The main workflow¶
Having kicked off the project and having had some success with getting Copilot to deliver what I was asking for, I settled into a new but also familiar workflow. Whereas normally, when working on a personal project, I'll write an issue for myself, at some point pick it up and create a PR, review and test the PR myself then merge, now the workflow turned into:
- Write an issue but do so in a way that when I assign it to Copilot it has enough information to go off and do the work.
- Wait for Copilot to get done.
- Review the PR, making change requests etc.
- Make any fixes that are easier for me to fix by hand that describe to Copilot.
- Merge.
In fact, the first step had some sub-steps to it too, I was finding. What I was doing, more than ever, was writing issues like I'd write sticky notes: with simple descriptions of a bug or a new feature. I'd then come back to them later and flesh them out into something that would act as a prompt for Copilot. I found myself doing this so often I ended up adding a "Needs prompt" label to my usual set of issue labels.
All of this made for an efficient workflow, and one where I could often get on with something else as Copilot worked on the latest job (I wasn't just working on other things on my computer; sometimes I'd be going off and doing things around the house while this happened), but... it wasn't fun. It was the opposite of what I've always enjoyed when it comes to building software. I got to dream up the ideas, I got to do the testing, I got to review the quality of the work, but I didn't get to actually lose myself in the flow state of coding.
One thing I've really come to understand during those 5 days of working on BlogMore was I really missed getting lost in the flow state. Perhaps it's the issue to PR to review to merge cycle I used that amplified this, perhaps those who converse with an agent in their IDE or in some client application keep a sense of that (I might have to try that approach out), but this feels like a serious loss to me when it comes to writing code for personal enjoyment.
The main problems¶
I think it's fair to say that I've been surprised at just how well Copilot understood my (sometimes deliberately vague) requests, at how it generally managed to take some simple plain English and turn it into actual code that actually did what I wanted and, mostly, actually worked.
But my experiences over the past few days haven't been without their problems.
The confidently wrong problem¶
Hopefully we all recognise that, with time and experience, we learn where the mistakes are likely to turn up. Once you've written enough code you've also written plenty of bugs and been caught out by plenty of edge-cases that you get a spidey-sense for trouble as you write code. I feel that this kind of approach can be called cautiously confident.
Working with Copilot, however, I often ran into the confidently wrong issue. On occasion I found it would proudly request review for some minor bit of work, proclaiming that it had done the thing or solved the problem, and I'd test it and nothing had materially changed. On a couple of occasions, when I pushed back, I found it actually doubting my review before finally digging in harder and eventually solving the issue.
I found that this took time and was rather tiring.
There were also times where it would do the same but not directly in respect to code. One example I can think of is when it was confident that Python 3.14 was still a pre-release Python as of February 2026 (it isn't).
This problem alone concerns me; this is the sort of thing where people without a good sense for when the agent is probably bullshitting will get into serious trouble.
The tries-too-hard problem¶
A variation on the above problem works the other way: on at least one occasion I found that Copilot tried too hard to fix a problem that wasn't really its to fix.
In this case I was asking it to tidy up some validation issues in the RSS feed data. One of the main problems was root-relative URLs being in the content of the feed; for that they needed to be made absolute URLs. Copilot did an excellent job of fixing the problem, but one (and from what I could see only one) relative URL remained.
I asked it to take a look and it took a real age to work over the issue. To its credit, it dug hard and it dug deep and it got to the bottom of the problem. The issue here though was it tried too hard because, having found the cause of the problem (a typo in my original Markdown, which had always existed) it went right ahead and built a workaround for this one specific broken link.
Now, while I'm a fan of Postel's law, this is taking things a bit too far. If this was a real person I'd tasked with the job I would have expected and encouraged them to come back to me with their finding and say "dude, the problem is in your input data" and I'd have fixed my original Markdown.
Here though it just went right ahead and added this one weird edge case as something to handle.
I think this is something to be concerned about and to keep an eye on too. I feel there's a danger in having the agent rabbit-hole a fix for a problem that it should simply have reported back to me for further discussion.
The never-pushes-back problem¶
Something I did find unsurprising but disconcerting was Copilot's unwillingness to push back, or at least defend its choices. Sometimes it would make a decision or a change and I'd simply ask it why it had done it that way, why it had made that choice. Rather than reply with its reasoning it would pretty much go "yeah, my bad, let me do it a way you're probably going to find more pleasing".
A simple example of this is one time when I saw some code like this:
@property
def some_property(self) -> SomeValue:
from blogmore.utils import some_utility_function
...
I'm not a fan of imports in the body of methods unless there's a demonstrable performance reason. I asked Copilot why it had made this choice here and its reply was simply to say it had gone ahead and changed the code, moving the import to the top of the module.
I see plenty of people talk about how working with an agent is like pair-programming, but I think it misses out on what's got to be the biggest positive of that approach: the debate and exchange of ideas. This again feels like a concern to be mindful of, especially if someone less experienced is bringing code to you where they've used an agent as their pair buddy.
The overall impression¶
Now I'm at the end of the process, and using the result of this experiment to write this post, I feel better informed about what these tools offer, and the pitfalls I need to be mindful of. Sometimes it wasn't a terrible way of working. For example, on the first day I started with this, at one point on a chilly but sunny Sunday afternoon, I was sat on the sofa, MacBook on lap, guiding an AI to write code, while petting the cat, watching the birds in the garden enjoy the content of the feeder, all while chatting with my partner.
That's not a terrible way to write code.
On the other hand, as I said earlier, I missed the flow state. I love getting lost in code for a few hours and this is not that. I also found the constant loop of prompt, wait, review, test, repeat, really quite exhausting.
As best as I can describe it: it feels like the fast food of software development. It gets the job done, it gets it done fast, but it's really not fulfilling.
At the end of the process I have a really useful tool, 100% "built with AI", under my guidance, which lets me actually be creative and build things I do create by hand. That's not a bad thing, I can see why this is appealing to people. On the other hand the process of building that tool was pretty boring and, for want of a better word... soulless.
Conclusion¶
As I write this I have about 24 hours of access to GitHub Copilot Pro left. It seems this experiment used up my preview time and triggered a "looks like you're having fun, now you need to decide if you want to buy it" response. That's fair.
So now I'm left trying to decide if I want to pay to keep it going. At the level I've been using it at for building BlogMore it looks like it costs $10/mth. That actually isn't terrible. I spend more than that on other hobbies and other forms of entertainment. So, if I can work within the bounds of that tier, it's affordable and probably worth it.
What I'm not sure about yet is if I want to. It's been educational, I can 100% see how and where I'd use this for work (and would of course expect an employer to foot the bill for it or a similar tool), and I can also see how and where I might use it to quickly build a personal-use tool to enable something more human-creative.
Ultimately though I think I'm a little better informed thanks to this process, and better aware of some of the wins people claim, and also better informed so that I can be rightly incredulous when faced with some of the wilder claims.
Also, it'll help put some of my reading into perspective.
