Stumbling Out of the Gate with AI

One of the lessons I've had to learn the hard way: Not only can AI make mistakes, it can't anticipate and prevent my mistakes!

Shocking, isn't it?

Well, no. That's just common sense. I want to share this experience and hope you can learn from my mistake.

I've maintained this site, https://www.gpcdata.com, since around 2010. The old site was built on ASP.NET WebForms.

With the assistance of Claude Code, I recently added two new websites, setting them up as subsites. The subsites are built on ASP.NET Core with Blazor Server running on .NET 8. Faster, cleaner, more maintainable, but with a downside. Due to limitations in my hosting environment, I had to deploy both sites confgured to run out of process.

<PropertyGroup>
   <TargetFramework>net8.0</TargetFramework>
   <Nullable>enable</Nullable>
   <ImplicitUsings>enable</ImplicitUsings>
   <AspNetCoreHostingModel>OutOfProcess</AspNetCoreHostingModel>
 </PropertyGroup>

The original site, being ASP.NET WebForms, wasn't effected by that limitation. And I ignored it. Hint, the mistake began right there.

Then, Claude and I took the next logical step; we refreshed the main site as an ASP.Net Core with Blazor Server as well. It looks great, works faster and better, and is much easier to maintain. I'm excited to see how it goes from here.

Two days after publishing the refreshed site, I discovered my mistake. Neither of the two subsites loaded any longer. The OutOfProcess configuration had been overridden by the refreshed code in the parent, now also on ASP.Net Core. Neither Claude nor I anticipated that, despite having worked through the same problem just a few weeks ago, when the second of the two subsites was published.

The fix was simple and quick: alter the configuration of the parent site so it too runs OutOfProcess.

My Point?

Don't get complacent.

As good as AI is, it generally can't anticipate anything you, the developer, don't prompt it to consider. If I had simply prompted Claude, prior to deploying the freshed version of GPCData.com, to review and evaluate all configuration settings needed to run the parent and two subsites, I'm sure he would have caught this discrepency, and saved me a monent of panic, short-lived though it was.