In 2015 I made
a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for
the MBTA:
A few
years later they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it
stopped working. Back in those days programming required effort, and
since there were other apps that did almost what I wanted it wasn't
worth it for me to update it. But now that we have genies (for better
or worse) I
had Claude one-shot the fix:
A decade ago I built jefftk.com/nextbus/ which is no more, but the
code still exists at ~/code/nextbus . It was a thin wrapper around
the MBTA nextbus API, but when they redid their API to no longer use
nextbus it wasn't worth it for me anymore. Could you get it working
again?
And it does:
Switching back to this as my daily driver, I especially like that it
will show me how stale the prediction is, so I have a better sense of
how much to trust it.
What set me off on wanting to revive this was being grumpy that the
predictions API doesn't do a good job with inbound at Ball
Square. Now that I have my own tooling, I'm working on this too:
Claude wrote me a logger
and in a week or so I can have it compare a few prediction approaches
and implement.
In 2015 I made a little webapp that would use the NextBus API to show predictions for the MBTA:
A few years later they moved from NextBus to their own API, and it stopped working. Back in those days programming required effort, and since there were other apps that did almost what I wanted it wasn't worth it for me to update it. But now that we have genies (for better or worse) I had Claude one-shot the fix:
And it does:
Switching back to this as my daily driver, I especially like that it will show me how stale the prediction is, so I have a better sense of how much to trust it.
What set me off on wanting to revive this was being grumpy that the predictions API doesn't do a good job with inbound at Ball Square. Now that I have my own tooling, I'm working on this too: Claude wrote me a logger and in a week or so I can have it compare a few prediction approaches and implement.
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