I accidentally broke my website. Claude fixed it in minutes

For a few weeks there, my website was missing articles. It's not a huge deal, but it broke in a very silent, sneaky way. Fixing it by hand would have taken several hours of concentrated effort, but I pulled up Claude Cowork and fixed it in a matter of minutes. I'm still shocked at how painless it was. 

I was writing about Spotify's Page Match feature when I tried to link to an older article about Spotify I had written. But I couldn't find it anywhere; not on my website or anywhere. I knew I had written it, but I couldn't find it locally, I hadn't sent a newsletter about it, and I never posted it on BlueSky. There was no proof it ever existed! Was I going crazy??

The issue

The root cause is that I got a second Mac and used the Migration Assistant to set it up. That worked splendidly, but the way I build my website is by processing a bunch of local files and then uploading them to GitHub. I was using a separate instance of Publii on both laptops to write articles, which meant I had two different versions of my site depending on which laptop I was using!

Logically, I just need to use the same centralized source to store my site's files, and I decided on Google Drive since Google is the ecosystem I'm most plugged in to. But the Migration Assistant was too helpful: Google Drive and Chrome believed both my laptops were the same laptop. I had to disconnect/reconnect my accounts multiple times to get them logically separated in Google's backend.

Now, how to resolve the differences between the sites? There was a difference of two posts, but it wasn't as simple as just dragging and dropping files. Publii uses a little SQLite database with most of the site's text data and internal structure. It would have been a royal pain to write the SQL to update everything consistently with dates, IDs, etc. Instead, I made Claude do it.

I opened Claude Cowork in my site's root directory with my canonical (old laptop's) files. I uploaded a .tar with the new laptop's site files and told it:

In my publii-config folder rests the canonical version of my static site. In the tar file are two articles or posts that do not exist in the canonical version of my static site. Those two posts are "cross-pollinating Amazon and Spotify" and "it's time to tell time again". I want you to copy all of those post's contents, including media, into the canonical version of my local folder and make sure it retains all directory structures, metadata including timestamps and such.