kohlio

The wonders of Claude Code and the Wayback Machine

by jesse kohl ·

It started as a simple project. Rebuild kohlio.co, move it off WordPress, make it plain and quiet and easy to read. And do the whole thing with Claude Code, no hand-coding, just to see how far I could push it.

That part went well. Almost too well. Once the new site was up and the old posts had been moved over, I had that dangerous feeling you get when a tool is working and you have some time left over. What else can this thing do?

So I asked it a simple question. Can you read the Wayback Machine?

Yes, it said. And then it showed me snapshots of kohlio.co going back years. Which got me thinking about the other places I’d written over the years. Not the corporate blogs or the client work or the ghostwritten posts with someone else’s name on them. My own stuff. The things I wrote for no reason other than wanting to write them.

Before kohlio, there was jessekohl.com.

I hadn’t thought about that site in a long time. I assumed it was gone. The hosting lapsed, the domain started redirecting to my Twitter account sometime around 2017, and whatever I’d posted there went with it. Or so I thought.

Claude Code found captures going back to 2010. (The 2010 ones aren’t mine, by the way. Before I owned the domain, jessekohl.com was a parked page selling “cash advance debt consolidation insurance.” Not my finest era, and I wasn’t even there for it.) My own blog starts in August 2011 with a post called “Why blog?” and runs through 2014, ten posts in all.

I asked Claude Code to bring them home. It dug each post out of the archive, pulled the images that survived, converted everything to the format this site uses, and saved them as drafts so I could read them before deciding what to do with them. It even went back through the old list pages to make sure it hadn’t missed any posts.

Reading them was a strange little time machine. Gamification, back when everyone was saying the word. Battlefield 3 versus Modern Warfare 3. The day I got an email from Vint Cerf (along with a few million other people). Spending $25 to ask 1,000 strangers whether Android or iOS was better, just because Google gave me a coupon. Getting back into Foursquare, getting close to becoming mayor of something, and then watching them freeze every mayorship right before I got there. The right to be forgotten, which I had opinions about. Of course I did.

Some of it holds up. Some of it really doesn’t. And there were typos. So many typos. Claude Code fixed those too, which younger me would have appreciated, even if he’d never admit it.

Only one thing was truly lost: a chart comparing searches for Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3. The Wayback Machine never saved it. I’ll survive.

But there was one more thing Claude Code found, and it’s my favourite part of the whole story. Three addresses from late 2011, all captured only as “page not found”:

Three tries at the same title. No text saved anywhere. Nothing on the site ever linked to them.

I have no memory of writing this post. But I know myself, and I know my career at the time, and I’m fairly sure this was a rant. A long one. Inspired by one or more former bosses, sharpened over three different headlines, and then, thankfully, deleted when I came to my senses. Some writing should stay lost. Past me made a good call there, and the Wayback Machine, bless it, kept his secret.

So that’s where a website redesign took me. I meant to clean up my little home on the web, and I ended up recovering a decade-old version of myself instead. Not bad for a few prompts.

I checked kohlio.com too. The Wayback Machine found a spam page from 2010, a server error and a 404.

I spent too much time thinking about whether to keep using kohlio.com or move to kohlio.co. I spent that time redesigning the site using Python Flask, and then did it all over again in server-side React (which was still relatively new then), and finally Next.js, before going back to WordPress for kohlio.co just in case I needed a homebase to test on in lieu of some client work happening at the time. Why kohlio.co instead of kohlio.com? Well dot com is… just so… you know.

Apparently that era of my life is better left forgotten.