sef.kloninger.com (Posts about AI)

Big Local News

Sef Kloninger — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 03:00:00 GMT

Lately I've been a volunteer contributor to the Big Local News project at Stanford. In my next post I'll describe what I've been doing — I think it's interesting. But this post is about the people and the project, which has been the best part.

Why Journalism? Why Journalists?

I didn't go looking to be part of journalism. It's not something I've ever done, not really even something I've aspired to. I didn't write for my high school paper. Intermittent posts to this blog are the most writing I've done in a long time. This blog is proof that I'm not much of a writer and I'm certainly not an investigator.

What I've come to understand is that writing is only a part of the journalist's job, maybe not even the most important part. Sure, you have to know structure and grammar, and know how to present complex ideas in a cogent way. But look at how Britannica defines journalism:

Journalism is the collection, preparation, and distribution of news and information to the public. Embedded in the idea of journalism is the notion that it exists to inform the public and hold the powerful to account.

There are a lot of verbs in there, none of which are "writing" or "editing."

These days the journalist's job seems to be as much about data as the traditional parts of the job: working the phones, cultivating sources, and shoe-leather chasing down leads. Journalists are now expected to know how to get data, evaluate it, and analyze it to pull out insights. Aside from the purely narrative stories, most stories are built on foundations of insightful data.

Indeed, if you read the FAQ at the Stanford Master's in Journalism program page, when someone asks "I'm a writer but I don't know how to program, is this program a fit for me?" the answer is "we'll teach you." I think that's pretty common in the field these days. But it's also a tall order. Some journalists want to be data engineers too, but some don't.

Back to the definition: "collection, preparation, and distribution" of news sounds like data science to me. But also read that second part, about "informing the public" and "holding the powerful to account." Good stuff, right? Journalists (at least the ones I've been working with lately) bring a sense of mission to the job. Sure, it's work, it's of civic importance, and there's pride in the craft. But what they seem to enjoy the most is speaking truth to power. They're troublemakers.

Big Local News

I found my way to the Big Local team through my friend Hannah. She's a librarian at Stanford. She introduced me to Cheryl Phillips, the director and program founder, and we met over coffee. We hit it off.

Two things impressed me. First, the mission. Big Local News uses technology to bend the cost curve for local journalism — make local news cheaper. I'll say a little more about why that resonates with me below. But I believe local news is worth fighting for, and I like how BLN is doing it. Trying to fix the demand side of the news business model feels really hard, swimming against a lot of currents — more readers! more exciting stuff! I think Big Local News, by taking on a supply-side fix, is taking a novel and more scalable approach.

Second, I really liked the BLN team. They are muckrakers and do-gooders, exactly the kind of mission-driven people I described above. Sure, they also have good technical chops and I enjoy doing tech stuff with them. But first and foremost they're journalists. Most have worked a beat or spent time in a newsroom. They know the domain, and they know what problems local news organizations actually have. So I have some confidence that if we build this stuff, it'll reach the local news outlets that need it. It's also important that they are bright, nice people.

After meeting the team and going to a conference I got to work (more on the project coming soon). For the past three months I've worked as a member of the team. They've welcomed me into their meetings. I sit with them in the McClatchy building on the Stanford campus, I'm in the Slack, and I went to their year-end party. It's nice to be affiliated with these folks. I like having an excuse to hang out with some troublemakers.

Last week I was proud to be added to the team "about" page — scroll down to the "Collaborators" section. 😀

Motivation

I think everyone's aware of the decline of the business model behind local news over the past twenty-some years. It's gone from bad to worse. A couple of examples.

In some places, like the Bay Area Peninsula where I live, local papers banded together as a nonprofit, Embarcadero Media, on the theory that they are a public good (which they are). Being a 501(c)(3) enables charitable giving to fill in gaps left when classified ads and subscriptions dried up. That's a fine solution to the problem — honest, and probably useful — but I think that might only work in wealthy places like here.

Not so much for Fresno, where I'm from. My mom and dad still both live there (separately) and each gets the daily paper. Both bemoan the slow decline of the Fresno Bee: the print version that Mom wants is down to three days a week and upward of $500/year to have delivered to your door. That's just too much, so Dad takes the SF Chronicle, a good paper but not local. Without news about your community, is it any surprise that people feel less connected to and invested in where they live? And yes, the mundane things like weather and high school sports do matter.

What's a place like Fresno to do? I recently came across Fresnoland, which looks to be doing some good reporting. They're structured as a nonprofit, like Embarcadero, and they've gotten good donors. I hope that's keeping the lights on! I see two members on their staff for whom Report for America pays half their salary — that seems like a cause worth supporting. Maybe it's presumptuous, but I imagine Fresnoland might need some help with the data science. They're exactly the kind of team that Big Local News is aiming to help.

I think having better, shared news is one part of healing the divisions in this country. If I can help with a little bit of that, it's worth doing.

"It's Overwriting, Not Appending"

Sef Kloninger — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

I like the command line. But more and more I find myself mediating those tasks through a chat, which surprises me because I used to find chat frustrating. But Claude is just so darn helpful.

Here's an example. I've been working on a typical scrape-and-loader for election data. It does one election cycle at a time to split up the work and give you a chance to inspect. After the first download, I verified the data which looked good. I asked Claude to get all the rest. It dutifully constructed a loop ("for i in 2000, 2002...") and started working down the list, which would take hours. Before heading to bed, I checked in.

Of course throwing away the data as we go isn't what I wanted.

What's fascinating is that I didn't ask for this check. Claude checked to make sure the job made sense and warned me when it didn't. Delightful!

I Built This: Leafletter

Sef Kloninger — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 05:00:00 GMT

I'd like to discuss an app I just wrote. Not so much the app itself, but how I made it and why.

You can try it out yourself. The web version is Leafletter.app and there's an iPhone app available on the Apple App Store. The about page has a short description of what it does. There are a couple of test campaigns where you can log a pretend leaflet distribution trip. Give it a try, that's what those test campaigns are for!

The two main use cases are: volunteers who distribute these leaflets need to know what neighborhoods have already been covered; workers can report in so others don't double up their efforts.

Most of the interaction is through the "worker view". There you have a map showing what's already been done and a button for logging your own trip. There are web and iOS versions, although the iOS one is mostly just a webview.

Why?

I built this app for a few reasons.

First was to help my wife. She's been working with Indivisible Mid-Peninsula here in the SF Bay Area to organize No Kings protests, and needed something like this.

There are existing apps out there for organizing campaigns, but they all cost money and are much more heavyweight than what we need here. Their target markets are people hiring and managing gig workers to distribute things, which means a lot of workflow to keep track of inventory and tracking work (GPS, photos). You wouldn't want all those flyers just in a trashcan somewhere. Instead, my goal was something simple, with a main interface that was easy to use and low friction -- no accounts!

Second, this was the capstone project in the Vibe Coding class I took this quarter. I spent a few more weeks tweaking it, making it more robust, and adding features, but the basics were working in that week I spent on it in class.

Third, it was just plain fun to do. I learned a ton living in Claude Code. The overall experience was joyful. While I'd like for this to get some use, the fun was in the making.

What I Learned

I liked managing things mostly through GitHub Issues. I have a nice workflow:

File a bug describing what I wanted
"Let's fix issue #100"
Simple things just got coded up right then, harder things would go through planning
Local testing
"Commit it and close the bug"
I do the git push
Infra notices and does its build and push

I did this for issues big and small -- at this writing that means over 100 issues. The bugs were a good way to have Claude capture its plan, or a good place to capture work-in-progress for later.

I recorded a two-minute screencast showing my workflow in action. This one was adding a little navigation feature, a request from my sister.

I also found it helpful to set up some personas that I could delegate tasks to. A Developer to do most of the work, adhering to some rules I put in for good coding practices ("always run tests"). And then two others that were rarely used, on demand: a Project Manager to debug GitHub and a UX Engineer to review and make suggestions ("Great, please open bugs for all of those").

The tricky part was managing the download of the street data and stitching it together into something manageable. It's a fair amount of data, and the OpenStreetMap backend isn't very reliable. Retries and long-running operations needed a queue and worker. The screenshots below show the organizer interface with one event still being processed, and the ops console showing the different servers.

I'm using Railway for hosting for the moment, which has been OK. Their storage setup is a bit wonky (#102) and it might prove to be expensive -- we'll see.

I did all of this easily within my $20/month Claude Code token budget. The biggest expense was the $100 fee to have the privilege of putting something up on Apple's App Store (boo).

Future work

Mobile still could use some work.

I tried an iOS native interface for a while, but could never get it to perform well enough. But that'd still probably give a better experience.
I'd like to do an Android app too. I don't have a dev phone, but I imagine I could buy one from a friend at some point.

And then a ton of features: organization views and ACLs, correlating streets with household demographics, better UX for selecting streets, etc. If you have feedback please file a bug!

I'm looking forward to getting this in the hands of some real users soon and getting some feedback.

"Hey Claude, What's Interesting In This Dataset?"

Sef Kloninger — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 15:00:00 GMT

This week I used Claude as my pipeline engineer and data analyst. I had a ton of fun and figured I'd write about it.

I've been taking a Data Visualization class at Stanford Continuing Studies (TECH 26, Winter 2026). I needed a final project. There's this data set I've always wanted to play with, TweetsKB. Researchers took the Twitter Firehose data from 2013-23, back when it was more available, and ran it through entity extraction and sentiment analysis. They made the dataset available for others to work with. It's well documented and a reasonable size, about 500GB. I figured there'd be something interesting in there.

The cool part didn't turn out to be the analysis itself. I did find and graph some trends, like Wordle hitting the scene in Feb 2022 and then falling off; contrast that with K-Pop, which we all know has been much more durable. You can see those in the presentation I did for the class, and I included some charts below.

But the main thing is this was just plain fun.

What I (We) Did

What I spent the week doing was chatting with Claude interspersed with running pipelines, bringing up and down jobs, etc. What it felt like though was having my own junior engineer working hard for me, doing whatever I asked, and doing it well and without complaint.

This section has more of the details of how it went. Consider skipping if you don't want to get in the weeds.

We started with ETL pipelines. File format conversion, multiprocessing, scaling to fit RAM and processor limitations, progress bars and interruption/restart logic.

Yikes, this is full of offensive stuff! I asked for redaction with stable terms and it found and used a nice off-the-shelf library.

When I didn't trust what I was seeing, I asked for end-to-end data quality tests. Claude wrote them and then found and fixed a double counting bug. Nice!

When I wanted to wander around in the data I asked for an EDA dashboard and got one. EDA is the term of art I learned in class, "exploratory data analytics". The idea is something where you can click around, slice and scrub, looking for interesting things like correlations and trends.

You can see this in the screenshot at the top of this post. Essentially I got the "Overview" and "Slice by Entity" tabs in one shot. How do you do EDA with it? For example, the default view is two baseball teams. See the peaks when the Red Sox won championships in 2013 and 2018? But the Astros peak was higher in 2017, presumably because of the scandal. Fun, right?

I then iterated on that dashboard quite a bit. Instead of a normal notebook or colab-style workflow I was used to, I iterated around the dashboard. I'd ask Claude to add or update charts in the dashboard ("annualize the last data point"), it'd reload, test and repeat. I did fall back to python or a notebook when I had to look at the raw data, but just in throwaway mode. I found this to be a really fast way to work.

But I still had a hard time finding something interesting in the dataset. So I just asked an open-ended question, basically "find interesting stuff" and it produced five analysis scripts. Most of what's in the "Analysis" came from this one query, except for "Democrats vs. Republicans", which I did on my own and didn't prove too insightful.

And yes, when I had ops issues Claude fixed those for me too, see screenshot below. Sure, I could tune workers vs. threads and manage PID files, but who wants to? And yes, when it came time to write the presentation, Claude wrote that for me too. Well, most of it.

You can play with the dashboard yourself. It's hosted on an underpowered server at my home, so if it doesn't work, let me know or try again later. All the code is in GitHub and there are known issues.

At some point I felt it was helpful to define "personas" for Claude to better describe the goals of each prompt. Then I started a prompt with "hey dashboard engineer, I'd like to...". Tough to tell how much that helped.

Some Thoughts

Let's not give AI too much credit. Pulling entity mentions out of tweets is something that data scientists and journalists have been doing for years. And this particular dataset probably has been around for a while and might very well have been used and written about, by undergrads. The story here might very well not be "gee whiz, looks at how smart AI is" and more "look at how AI has scooped up and repackaged years of everyone else's work."

The speed of accomplishing these dev/debug tasks was remarkable. I felt like I had a coworker. And at remarkably low cost, too. This was all using the Claude $20/month plan. This past week was the time I poked above the token cap. I happily paid $5 more to keep on going.

Is this programming? I think so, at least it felt that way when I was doing it. I was very much using the same parts of my brain as when I'm writing all the code myself. Indeed for years most of us have been "programming" mostly via Google and Stack Overflow. It's like that but fast.

Charts

Here are three charts that fell out. Again, don't focus so much on the insights but how these came from a high-level, open ended prompt.

Some Screenshots

Maybe some people would like to see what this looked like when I was doing it. Here's a screenshot during pipeline development. On the left is Claude adding some logging; the top right is tail -f on a log file, and the bottom right shows the progress bars churning through the data.

My modest Mac has 8 performance cores, hence 8 workers.

And this screenshot is kind of fun. Look at how Claude explained a worker crash issue that I asked it to debug: "You already flagged it, the UI literally says..." 😀

Claude made the adjustment and saved its suggestions in a Github issue in case I want to revisit it later.

AI Is Good At Janitorial Work

Sef Kloninger — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:00:00 GMT

It's been nice having AI tools at the ready for cleanup work. You know, those tasks that require a little program or script. Sure you can write it yourself, but it won't be fun, and it'll take some time, so instead you just don't bother and it doesn't get done.

Instead of just knocking this out I decided this would be a fun one to try with the two tools I'm using the most these days, Gemini and Claude. I can't really call this a proper bakeoff, since it's just those two and it's not an especially hard task.

And the result? Both did well but Gemini did a little better. Gemini got it right on the first try; Claude had two bugs that were easy to find and fix. Claude was a little nicer to work with and produced a nicer description of the solution. Aside from that, the end product was identical.

The Task

I wanted to clean up some of the old files backing this blog. I migrated the site from Wordpress to Nikola in 2013. Even back then I complained about the crufty file format, but couldn't be bothered to fix it then.

The prompt describes in a fair bit of detail what I wanted done. Probably too much detail. It's down at the bottom of this post.

The best way to see what they did is to just look at the resulting commits: Gemini and Claude. They're pretty similar. I asked both to save their work in a migration_scripts subdirectory, including its own summary of the work and full log.

For both tools I pay the $20/month that gives me access to reasonable token limits and good production models -- Gemini 3 and Sonnet 4.6.

Thoughts on Claude

I didn't describe the problem as "Wordpress-style naming" but Claude sussed that out. Honestly I'd forgotten that was the source of the problem. Nice!

I like that Claude inserted comments in the configuration file without being asked to.

Despite being told to test, there were two bugs that I had to find.

Some of the redirects were broken. I pointed the problem out and it did more thorough testing using curl and found the problem. The new format was what Gemini came up with in the first pass (luck? smarts?).
A missing newline between the metadata and the body caused the hero images to be dropped.

Thoughts on Gemini

I haven't used the Gemini CLI as much by this point. It seems to have borrowed much of its UI and flow from Claude Code (slash commands, asking questions as it goes) so it's familiar. It's really nice to use, just a smidgen less mature and polished than Claude Code.

I preferred Claude's writeup a little so I went with that one. But Gemini wins the prize for nailing the task on the first try!

Usage

I really liked how Claude shows how much of its context window is used via the /context command. I had a harder time getting this kind of thing out of Gemini, and even when I did it was harder to grok.

I couldn't tell with either if I'm getting close to any global usage limits. I should hope not, this wasn't a very big job.

Claude `/context` Output

Gemini `/stats model` Output

Prompt

Both started with this:

First read DEV.md for context about this web site.

In the posts subdirectory are many files that follow an old 
naming convention.  Please convert them all to the new file
naming convention.

The old convention has files of the format YYYYMM<slug>.SUFFIX,
where YYYY is the year, MM is the month, and SUFFIX is html or
meta. <slug> is the short form of the title, and should match
the "slug" field in the metadata

To convert to the new convention

1. Drop the YYYYMM file prefix

2. Combine the "html" and "meta" files into one markdown file
   with a "md" suffix. The contents of "meta" are at the top of
   the file as an HTML comment

3. Add redirects so the old names can still be served. Add tuples
   in the REDIRECTIONS of conf.py

Use the `nikola build` and `nikola serve` commands to test your
work. Make sure all old URL's still function. Make sure pages
look the same. Make sure tags still work.

Do not commit changes. Do not push to production.

I also checked in a DEV.md file that described the purpose, directory layout, and some constraints. Again, maybe overkill, but I figured this isn't the last time I'll be asking one of these tools to help me futz with this site.

Yeah, I Did Some Vibe Coding Too

Sef Kloninger — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is a story about my recent experience Vibe Coding. The work itself isn't impressive and this writeup isn't different than the many gee-whiz posts you see these days. I didn't do three apps in a day. But I wanted to write up my experience, mostly to give me an excuse to tell an old-time programming story from the 1900's.

Today, 2026

While I'm on a break I'm taking a Vibe Coding class. It's a fun excuse to play with some new toys, and it's well taught, and I like doing things with my friend Jane.

One interesting tidbit: the first day of class, February 3, 2026, was one year and one day after "vibe coding" itself was coined via tweet. That name seems to have stuck, for the time being at least. On last week's ATP they said that by this time next year this will probably just be called "coding" and I bet they're right.

Anyway our week one assignment was to code up a game. In about two hours and $10 I had something up and running. I spent another couple of hours futzing with version control, documentation, and hosting. But that's it!

It's pretty basic, and not all that much fun, but you can play it here. It's hosted on Github pages, just like this blog. The code and construction notes are in checked in.

This was my first experience with Replit. It's impressive and fun. This was what was recommended for the class and the good folks at Replit were nice enough to give us all $30 in credits, which I had plenty to spare. Most of my comrades presented apps that were fancier than mine with 3D graphics, sound, and more interactive gameplay. Some also said, though, that they ended up spending much more than I did, so YMMV on costs.

One interesting part was dealing with integration. To get their code deployed onto my personal website required wiring up a GitHub workflow, which I'd never done before. No problem, Replit took care of that too. Then I asked Gemini to get local hosting running. When I hit a permissions problem and a crash I had to resist the urge to copy paste the error messages into a search boxes and Stack Overflow, like I've done for years. Instead I asked Gemini to debug and sort this out for itself and it did straight away. Pretty great.

Forty Years Ago, 1985

Why'd I pick this weird old chase game? Well, that's the more fun and nostalgic part of the story.

When I was fourteen years old, I spent the summer hand-coding a video game. I'd gone to a family gathering and my older cousin Erik brought his Mac from college. It was the first I'd seen a Mac and fell in love. I thought the Daleks game he had running on it was so cool. The screenshot on the right is from that Classic Mac website of that game that I found online, and is exactly how I remember it looked.

Upon return to Fresno I got to work. I spent most of the rest of that summer writing a clone of Daleks on my Apple //e. All hand-coded 6502 opcodes and twos complement math for branch offsets by hand (I didn't have an assembler), in pencil on graph paper. The hardest part was getting smooth animation working, since the Apple //e "hi res" graphics system was super quirky.

It took about two months to get it working. It's the first time I can remember being in a flow state and I loved it. It was my first "real program" and began my lifelong love of computers.

sef.kloninger.com (Posts about AI)

Big Local News

Why Journalism? Why Journalists?

Big Local News

Motivation

"It's Overwriting, Not Appending"

I Built This: Leafletter

Why?

What I Learned

Future work

"Hey Claude, What's Interesting In This Dataset?"

What I (We) Did

Some Thoughts

Charts

Some Screenshots

AI Is Good At Janitorial Work

The Task

Thoughts on Claude

Thoughts on Gemini

Usage

Claude /context Output

Gemini /stats model Output

Prompt

Yeah, I Did Some Vibe Coding Too

Today, 2026

Forty Years Ago, 1985

Claude `/context` Output

Gemini `/stats model` Output