Hexmap: Week 0x20

This is the week I really started working with AI.

While improving the map lookups for areas, I got frustrated with how long my build times hav gotten. Via Kilo Code, I asked Claude (Sonnet 4) to investigate and decided to finally deprecate Cornucopia. So I gave the agents the big task of moving every existing query to SQLx, following the patterns I’d established already.

It did pretty well! It took a fair amount of time, I had to step in twice to course-correct, and it took me a few days to find a place where it decided to replace a complex query with a static “0” value. But despite that feeling like unneccessary make-work, I believe I spent about 8 hours managing it through a task that would have taken me a week.

I certainly have some selection bias, but I am very happy with the approach I’ve taken of building up a system and gradually introducing agents into my process of growing it.

My agentic colleagues and I also implemented Wikipedia lookups to enrich area pages. Wanting to respect Wikipedia’s API and running Strava rate limiting from my dev environment led me to wanting more robust management of connections to external services. So I had the AI introduce a layer for these calls that gives me an overview of service health. And then we expanded the rudimentary failure logging I had put in place for risky data processes to cover almost everything that is done in the background.

The end result is a rather mature set of system administration tools, without bloating my dependancies or integrating with other services, well beyond what I would have ever implemented alone.