patel.codes is now <noscript>

2026-05-10 [home]

Motivations

Recently, I set a goal to more actively write content for my website. In coming back to the repository, the friction for writing content was unbearable. While I initially set out for simplicity, I somehow landed in the worst of all worlds:

  1. JavaScript dependencies (MathJax)
  2. Handwriting HTML files
  3. Handwriting galleries
  4. Forgetting to update sitemap.xml

I wanted to keep everything minimal but functional.

Sprinkle in a little bit of slop

As a Go programmer, I immediately reached for a minimal binary that would use rsc.io/markdown to convert my writing into HTML. Similarly, a single Go HTML template solves the gallery toil.

I also wanted to remove MathJax. This seemed like the perfect task for an LLM:

  1. Self-contained
  2. Easily verifiable
  3. Replaced typing burden

I booted up Claude Code. After exploring a few Go LaTeX parsers, I simply told it to generate a recursive descent parser for LaTeX to preprocess before converting to HTML with MathML. It happily did so with two bugs in all of 83 seconds. Another couple minutes of active thought and a usable parser eliminated both my writing friction and gave me a <noscript> website.

The only downside here is that I felt the need to write the following into my README:

There is no promise anything here will be maintained, will continue compiling, or ever compiled.

./gen

Now, it is easier than ever for me to write content and modify my site. I can simply stream my consciousness into .drafts/ and programmatically generate and preview my site before launching: go run ./cmd/site.

I really tried to avoid GitHub Actions for various reasons; however, I settled for the following, notably excluding any execution of the Go binary for deployment:

  1. Checkout
  2. Copy gen dir
  3. Deploy the site

Source code for patel.codes is on my GitHub.