A new blog and my first AI-assisted comic reader
The blog is back. My old site had stopped working, and I’ve moved hosting from OVH to O2Switch. To start things off, I’m sharing a project I built with a lot of help from AI: a web app for reading my digital comics.
The project is on GitHub: https://github.com/Starbugstone/panel-page-flip.
You can try the reader at https://comics.starbugstone.com/.
Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast!
Stone
A later update: what the project became
Since that first post, comics.starbugstone.com has grown into a reader for CBZ, CBR, CB7, CBT and PDF files. It has private libraries, saved reading progress and sharing that gives access to a file without storing a second copy.
The stack described in this update uses Symfony 6.4, PHP 8.2, MySQL 8 and Doctrine on the backend, with React 19 and Vite on the frontend. Local development runs in Docker, while the hosted version runs on shared hosting. Moving to a structured backend took more work than the initial prototype, but made the project easier to develop further.
My version of “vibe coding” was to describe what I wanted, let an AI produce a first pass, then read and revise the result. It was useful for getting started and for repetitive code. Deciding what belonged in the application still needed my attention.
The prototype took days. The less visible work—authentication, unusual file formats, consent handling, deployment and the backend migration—continued long afterwards. That’s where I spent much of the time turning it into something I could keep using.
If you’re trying an AI-assisted side project, I’d start with a small prototype and leave room in the plan for reviewing and rebuilding parts of it. Getting a first version on screen is encouraging; keeping it working is the longer job.
Later update: Introducing Panel Page Flip, my online comic reader.
