From Dormant Folder to Live Calculator
Out of the drawer
This project sat as a dormant ideas folder until 27 June, when it was activated with a written brief and three independent AI consultant proposals; one each from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok. The three plans disagreed usefully. Synthesised into a single execution spec, they became the version-3 build plan, and the calculator went from concept to a deployable site inside two days.
The stack is deliberately boring: static HTML, vanilla CSS and JavaScript, no build step, no accounts, no server-side anything. The calculation runs entirely in the browser, which is both a privacy promise and an operations decision; a folder of files deploys to the edge and needs no maintenance.
The version-3 quality pass
The single stylesheet was split into base.css (geometry and neutral token fallbacks) and berries.css (the palette and type skin), following the portfolio CSS standard, so the site can be re-skinned by swapping one file. Fonts moved in-house: Plus Jakarta Sans and Fraunces, five preloaded woff2 files, no third-party font calls; consistent with the privacy promise. Every emoji became a proper icon.
The content ecosystem arrived in the same pass: a pillar strategy guide, eight state pages, and six holiday guides; sixteen pages generated by a build script from the same verified holiday JSON the calculator reads, so every date on every page renders from data and none is hand-typed. Shareable plan URLs round it out: the tool encodes its inputs as query parameters, prefills, and auto-runs on load.
Two honest bugs
First: the project plan file was found truncated mid-line; a file-writing hazard in the working environment silently clips growing files. It was repaired, and every substantial write since gets verified against expected byte counts on disk.
Second: the “Copy Share Link” button reported Link copied even when nothing reached the clipboard, because the confirmation was written unconditionally and the copy was never awaited. The fix awaits the clipboard API and reports failure as failure; the principle is documented in the editorial standards: the site does not claim what it has not verified.