This is just a short followup to the last RustRadio post. If you came for more rants about C, you’ll be disappointed.

I’ve never been that interested in writing UI code, including HTML. You can see the “programmer art” in the screenshots linked from www.habets.pp.se.

And then the slightly different tech section, that doesn’t serve much of a purpose now that we have github.

I’ve not been happier with GTK, QT, and the others either.

But RustRadio needs a UI.

I feel like the browser is the most stable and portable UI. So I’d already decided on that. So now I have to manually do a bunch of DOM manipulation, to create an interactive UI? Or worse, learn the React/Angular/Whatever flavor of the day, that will be obsolete by tomorrow afternoon? Gag me with a spoon.

LLM to the rescue

For now I’m just continuing to focus on the SDR and architectural parts of RustRadio, and I’m letting the LLM-written code do the HTML manipulation.

Yeah, it’s kinda vibe coding. But doesn’t use unsafe, and it demonstrably outputs what I want (I mean, sure it may require some follow-up prompts), so who cares?

The vibe coding is isolated to the files doing the drawing. If I want to artisanally craft better code in the future, that’s the file that needs to be rewritten. Until then, it works.

The demo, in all its glory

You can run the demo too.

See the quick start instructions in the ruwasm repo for how to run this UI live with an RTL-SDR.