Ideas to Realities

Weather has had another overhaul, though less significant. Everything below the big graph can be moved. Positions are remembered per browser. A location header stays on top with the most important details. Have a large display? Up to 3 columns for viewing the data. A Hazards card added to show the most concerning weather conditions in one place.

The old Radar is gone. Only the interactive one remains. It has been optimized. On a cold load it is faster than the old radar. In addition to enhancing the touch and click performance, new map overlays of watches, storm prediction, smoke and fire, lightning, drought, rain, temperature mapping, and aurora reporting. The radar supports custom sizes now. Storm chaser information can be added. A satellite layer is also available.

The site has supported mobile device home screens (called a PWA). Now it also can send alerts. Add to your Home Page on iOS or Android, go into Weather Settings, and turn on the Alerts. Get notified for weather alerts in your area without going into the site.

Other updates... The additional news categories increased the amount of duplicate articles. I added a duplicate finder. It combines articles based on key word matches to minimize duplicate articles. Some still sneak by. Buttons and other controls have been refined and are more consistent everywhere.

These are changes that would have taken me months to do. Some of the ideas have been on my wish list for years. With the assistance of AI and a few weeks of my time, they are all fully implemented. There has been more custom work done on this site in the past 3 months than the prior 3 years.

When the Limitation Changes

As my comfort with AI grows, so do the projects I assign it. In the last week, AI has been adding features far faster than I ever had time to do in the past. The limitation is no longer my coding free time... it is now the ideas I have for enhancing the site. Every feature added required investigation and follow-ups before functioning as intended. I believe skill and know-how are required to validate that AI has not made a mistake. As AI often tells me: "You are right for saying that."

Weather: Added heat index alerts, wave forecasts - if you're close to a large body of water, 3 hr rain forecasts, allergy forecast, more precise caching - using the Location finder is more accurate than entering your city by name. An optional interactive radar adds full pan and zoom, higher resolution, and international support. Initial data loads are higher with the new radar. Incremental loads are smaller. Load the map one time, and only the radar data from that point on.

Site theme: All buttons and formatting have been aligned to make the different components on this site feel more cohesive than ever.

News: The backend function to add news feeds had been broken... now it works. It adds icons, allows for easy customization, has drag and drop to rearrange the feeds. The front end has a slider to determine how many articles to display, giving more granular control. I increased the news feed list from 24 to 48 hours, improving the amount of searchable news. 10 new technology-focused feeds were added to the news system. They are enabled by default. Click the Settings button to turn off any feeds you do not want to see.

When the limitation changes, so does the game.

Faster with Reservations

AI models continue to improve. The latest models will try multiple options to find the best one. This ability has enhanced this site. I believe there are no measurable performance optimizations left here. It is time to add features. Today I added Air Quality graphs to the Weather page. Less than 2 hours from concept to production.

The most significant AI-assisted enhancements? The weather graphing engine was 33kb, AI written 7kb. Weather radar uses an animated GIF and breaks it into 10 frames for processing. My code did this in 0.0157 seconds. AI code: 0.0069 seconds; 2.3x faster. That's not the biggest impact...

I used Tesseract to OCR the radar images; to ensure the time displayed was when the image was captured. 28mb of code. I optimized the execution code down to 0.9 seconds.

AI replaced it with a machine learning process. It creates glyphs of the time characters, adding new glyphs when needed. Size? 14kb; 0.05% of what I was using. Speed? 0.00008 seconds; 11,250x faster.

A cautionary tale: AI made mistakes on this journey. Some required me to restore from backup. AI can be reckless and dangerous. I was prepared. For every frustration it caused, it rewarded me with code that would have taken me weeks to write. It's worth the effort, but you must understand what it is doing and be diligent in reviewing.