Weekly Log - May 16, 2025

Key Lessons

• This week I attempted to build internationalization into the system. The goal here is to have the basics of internationalization for 2 languages built into the system from the beginning.
• We started with English and Espanol. I wanted to set up how we’d add new games and enhance them with translations and keys.
• Gemini 2.5 pro (05-06) was pretty great at figuring out the roadmap. We wrote up a pretty great ticket.
• The internationalization threads got long and we got caught up in many long discussions and the context started to get large. I forked off many sub-threads.
• In the end it worked.
• But now I have an instability in the Astro system. And I have to look back to see where the change went wrong.
• If I want to build towards a system where I can use an agent and write tickets I need a better process. Gemini has a tendency to “get the job done”
• It will add comments like

// TODO: Investigate why Astro.locals.i18n is not populated as expected.
 
// Normally, 'allConfiguredLocales' and 'siteDefaultLocale' should come from Astro.locals.i18n.
 
// Using hardcoded fallback based on astro.config.mjs due to Astro.locals.i18n being undefined.

This is terrible. No one including AI is going to read this and do anything about it. In another project I am doing Test-Driven-Development. I am not quite sure how astrojs handles that.

• You have to know what you’re talking about

  • At one point Gemini suggested I move a script to the /public folder but AstroJS doesn’t process those files the same way. If I hadn’t known this already that would have taken us down a rabbit hole.

• Reverting all the way back.

• Turns out the dev version was working but production was not working.

• I had to revert all the way back to the pre-i18N version of the branch.

• Thank goodness for Git. But I think we could/should do a better job of reverting.