Rebooting TrendWeight (Again)

A while ago, I shared that I was going to rewrite TrendWeight from scratch (see Why Rebuild?). And then there was three years of radio silence on the project. The rewrite stalled at 70%—most of the interesting architecture was done, leaving authentication flows and other tedious tasks.

What unstuck this project? AI coding tools, specifically Claude Code.

AI coding tools make tedious tasks easier. Plus, playing with new AI coding assistants is genuinely fun—they're like new toys. Sure, they're not perfect and sometimes generate questionable code, but they transform grunt work into something more engaging. The project stopped feeling like a chore.

I decided to not just finish the in-progress Next.js rewrite as is, and instead I decided to adjust the tech stack (again). My 2021 perspective on Next.js was overly optimistic. It's solid for content sites, but for interactive applications like TrendWeight, the server-side complexity adds up quickly. I also fell out of love with Chakra UI, and I wanted to move to Supabase instead of Firebase.

Current stack:

Frontend: Vite (stable, fast, minimal configuration)
Backend: ASP.NET Core (Vite SPAs need a backend, and I know C#/.NET well)
Styling: Tailwind (utility classes over opinionated components)
Authentication/Database: Supabase (self-hostable, Postgres compatible)

Claude Code handled the implementation well, particularly in dealing with grunt work:

The entire authentication stack (social logins, email magic link)
Migrating from Next.js to Vite + C#
Migrating from Chakra UI to Tailwind

Of course, AI coding tools still make a bunch of mistakes, and TrendWeight is complicated enough that you can’t really vibe code and get away with it. I definitely had to pay close attention to what Claude was doing (and in not a few places had to go back and clean up questionable choices after the fact), but I still enjoyed the process.

The rewrite is almost done. Just testing and polish remain, primarily around user migration UX. If things go smoothly, you can expect a follow-up post in the next couple weeks announcing the launch of the new site, so stay tuned!

Rebooting TrendWeight (Again)

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