From Grok to Gemini: Improving Mini

Mini was started with a simple prompt in Grok.

It should be created using the same principles as Jekyll: generate static files from Markdown files.

Simply speaking, to mix the contents of HTML layouts and merge it with the Markdown rendering output.

Many other static generators exist, but I’d like to try an extremely minimalist approach.

Without i18n, Liquid templates, or any other feature.

You generate the blog, make minimal configurations, and voilà.

I’ve achieved some success at first, not before tweaking the code here and there, fixing minor bugs and adjusting it for my needs.

Grok even generated a little CLI with an interesting help section. For example, when you call “mini” in the terminal without any command, it produces:

blog $ mini
mini - a minimal static site generator

Usage:
  mini new <name>       # Create a new site
  mini newpost "Title"  # Create a new blog post
  mini build            # Build site to _site/
  mini server           # Start development server (port optional)

Pretty cool, huh?

At this point I was struggling to fix a partial template rendering, something like:

<!-- index.html -->
<div>
  <%= render "header" %>
</div>

The code generated by Grok was a bit confusing, not to say messy.

After hours fighting the hallucinations, I finally gave up and went to Gemini.

Surprisingly, it produced a more organized and clean version, fixing the “render” method bugs whilst suggesting code improvements and a new “TemplateContext” class, which I considered an elegant solution.

So for now, I’ll keep improving mini as required on Gemini.

Next, I’m going to write a README.md file to help newcomers to get started easily.

Nice work for a sunday.

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