4/14/25
[Embedded site: https://neelbaronia.github.io/rose-art/rose-website.html](https://neelbaronia.github.io/rose-art/rose-website.html)
Embedded site: https://neelbaronia.github.io/rose-art/rose-website.html
Twas the night before tax day, and I was on hold for over 2 hours trying to speak to the IRS about a previous tax return they lost. I had all this free time and OpenAI announced GPT 4.1 earlier today, which is apparently best in class for coding. I also have been playing with Midjourney v7, which released a few days earlier, and wanted to try out Windsurf, which I haven’t used yet. So I figured I’d smash all these together in a vibe-code side project.
close up of juliet leaning in profile holding a rose and smiling at it, osamu tezuka style, soft reds and greens --ar 3:2 --sref 202645976 --sv 4 --v 7
One of my favorite quotes is from Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet remarks:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other would smell just as sweet.”
The exercise of what this quote has to do with AI is left to the reader. I experimented a ton with different style references before I got to the above image.
I used an ASCII Art Generator to input an image and get out the ascii art I wanted. I had to fiddle a ton with the jiggle effects and saturation.
Once I had the ascii art as an HTML, I went over to WIndsurf (which I was using for the first time) and asked it to help me build a site. I used GPT4.1 and prompted my way to an incredibly messy index.html file (CSS, JS, and HTML all in one monofile; talk about spaghetti code). From there, I had Windsurf start a local server for me to see/test the site in and tweak some of the JS parameters. Once it was ready, I pushed to GH and made a page (also the first time I’ve made a public GH page).
You can check it out here.
I am an incredibly slow typist. Despite that, it was dead simple to ask Windsurf/GPT4.1 to walk me through the steps to take a raw html file and turn it into a website. I can’t comment on the quality of the new model, since they all kind of feel like magic to me, but the end-to-end experience of sending this out into the world was incredibly smooth.