I'm working on adding Dark Mode to the site. And then, while we're at it, it might be fun to add a theme switcher and have additional color themes just to changes things up.

No promises though! Hopefully I won't have to abandon this feature, but it's a lot of work. I asked Claude to identify all unique colors in the codebase and it found ~300+ colors. All these small variations of colors accumulated over the last 20 years in the codebase.

In theory I could ask Claude Code to merge it all into a small palette that is more manageable for writing themes, but it would probably do a bunch of things I don't want. So it's more of a gradual process.

For example today I asked Claude to identify all the green/lime colors in the unique colors list we made, and then merge them into a smaller lime scale of just 5 steps. It worked pretty well!

So I'm down to about 200 colors atm. A bunch of refactoring happens on the way, some dead code (unused php/css).

This is Phase 2. Phase 1 was identifying all the unique colors. Phase 3 is when I have a manageable palette of ~50 theme-able colors. I will then implement a theme switcher drop-down somewhere, or maybe put it in the Settings, with a live preview.

I will start with a Dark Mode theme which has been requested. Designing a good dark mode is not trivial, but we'll see. There's a bunch of places where you have "use this color but lighter" for the background, where I am guessing it will break in Dark Mode, where you'd want darker instead. So it will be more refactoring, in theory I might have to deduplicate some colors into their lighter/darker variants so I can fully theme them.

I'm working with the cheaper Claude Pro subscription which is ~ 20 EUR. I was using Claude Sonnet before but now I switched to Opus 5.5 which is more powerful and I am not running into the usage limits so that's good. Obviously here I am not "vibe coding" something where I let Claude run for 1h on some complex problem so that helps.

So yeah. Moving on with the times. I for one, welcome our AI overlords. I think it's amazing, at least for developers. I am still fascinated now and then by how the AI figures out things. People say "it just predicts the next word"... that is obviously a massive over simplification of what is going on. And with multi-modal input it's just nuts.

So I'm trying to do more complex things gradually with AI. Learning curve. I thought it was pretty neat Claude used "headless chrome" basically to screenshot a page before/after and evaluate if the merged colors did not move too much visually. Whoah. I didn't even now I could run "headless chrome" on the command line.

Somehow this reminded me of Beastie Boys - Intergalactic. :P

PS: if you have any requests / comments related to Dark Mode please comment in Github Issue Implement Dark Mode #403. If you have favorite websites in Dark Mode I can use as inspiration, those are welcome.