Leaflet Testing and Launch, What’s Next for AT Explore

Hello there! I think this might start to turn into a weekly post… but I’m not committing to that just yet.

Last week I wrote about adding Leaflet documents to AT Explore. This past week was all about testing against different Leaflet posts to make sure everything actually rendered correctly.

Leaflet support progress

Early in the week I launched Leaflet support to my beta environment (basically my pre-prod setup). Once I started running through posts, I found a bunch of things that weren’t rendering correctly.

View post on Bluesky

Part of that comes from me building a lot of the first version with AI. It was helpful for getting things moving quickly, but it also missed some pretty big pieces — like certain elements not showing up or images being wired up wrong.

Bluesky post embeds ended up taking the most time. I wanted them to work exactly like they do elsewhere in the app, but the components I had weren’t as reusable as I hoped. I’ve got some refactoring to do here, but it’s close. Along the way I also found and fixed some unrelated bugs, like videos not working or nested quote posts not showing.

By Wednesday I had everything running in beta behind a feature flag, and by Thursday all the code was in production. If my last round of testing goes smoothly, I’ll enable it in production this weekend.

View post on Bluesky

Expanding Lexicon support

I mentioned last week that I’ve been experimenting with ActivityPub. That’s still on my radar, but I also want to expand support for more Lexicons. Leaflet has some outside of documents that I’d like to support, and I’m also really interested in Tangled since it’s a completely different type of data.

View post on Bluesky

For ActivityPub, I think I can spin up profile and post pages pretty quickly, especially if I can reuse some of the components I’ve already built. I expect I’ll run into the same kind of issues I had with Leaflet though, where the tricky part is just testing across lots of different posts. ActivityPub also has some content types that AT Protocol doesn’t, like polls, that I’ll need to figure out.

AI in my workflow

I’ve also been experimenting with AI in my dev flow. A lot of the first Leaflet code came from AI, but the results were mixed — it either left things out or just didn’t attempt to implement features like embeds.

Lately I’ve been trying a new approach: have AI generate an implementation plan first, review that myself, let it write the code, and then I review and make changes where needed. I only started using this flow halfway through Leaflet, so I’m curious to see how it works when I get to start fresh on a feature.

On top of that, I built an MCP a couple of weeks ago that can talk to AT Explore, which has been super helpful for checking Lexicon schemas. I’ve also been playing with sub-agents in Claude Code, which has been fun for breaking down bigger tasks.

What’s next

If all goes well, Leaflet should be live in production this weekend. After that, I’ll probably dig more into ActivityPub and maybe spin up some early profile and post pages. I’d also like to expand Leaflet support to cover its other Lexicons.

The refactor on post embeds is going to be important too. Once that’s in place, it’ll make it a lot easier to support both AT Protocol and ActivityPub posts side by side without duplicating code.