This is a story about what you can do with AI. But it doesn’t start with AI.

A colleague showed me the site https://start.me/ and I liked it. He said how he was using it, and all the community pages, and what was available for free. I couldn’t help but notice, this just seemed like another repository to better categorise me for a company. Everything was registered to my account, going up to their servers and with all these site logos I was creating links and paths from every computer I used it from.

I didn’t want any of that, but I was immediately attracted to the idea of getting rid of bookmarks, and using this tab/widget visual method.

So I took this to https://claude.ai and within a day we created https://darkstart.net/ , but possibly not the way you think. So I want to take you through the steps, and at the end you can use mine or download what Claude and I created, to host yourself.

The Prompts

How well do you know the start.me web app?

Really well it turns out. It told me all about the widgets, features and how the site is structured with free and paid tiers.

I don't need all these widgets - really just the ability to add my own groups. I don't want you to build anything just yet.

Right now I'm curious how to best tackle this.

Then we started taking about what I wanted actually wanted, and how I wanted it to act

• Put the ownership of this page onto the user not the server
• Tabbed Pages
• Widget groups that you can add URLs to
• Custom Backgrounds (allow for 3 base images)
• The ability to backup and import everything, pages or widgets
• Dragging widgets and links to organise
• Avoid leaking of information about the user from this page
• Don’t import code – everything must be self contained

That was it – Claude made something – I tested it, and over the day we tweaked a few parts, added a guide and the most important part – added the dividing lines. That may seem simple but as far as organising your links it is crucial.

The Experts knowledge

I knew I wanted it to be private, but the scale of the leaks that can occur and how to combat them – that’s just beyond me. But Claude knew what was up – and from there they targeted and solved:

• Favicons revealing your whole link list
• The referrer telling pages where we came from
• DNS prefetch
• Spellcheck sending text to Google or Microsoft
• EXIF data in uploaded images
• No outside resources

The other major update we needed to add was a reminder of how long it has been since I backed up since something has changed. Because it doesn’t sit on the server – the onus is on me the user to back up.

The ability to import your HTML Bookmark exports changed my life – this revealed the black hole that my Bookmarks had become – and organising them into Widgets that I dragged back and forth to pages to put into categorise widgets become my obsession for a few nights. It also highlighted dozens of dead links.

I also liked that I could have different versions based on the browser I used and the profile logged into it. This means Gamer me has one – SomeGuy@Works4Me has another one focused for him. Work and Home inherently have their own version, but I can also just save an export and import a useful shared page.

What’s the “Take Away“?

Warm up the AI. It needs Context, Purpose and a Role to play.

Then you need to Guide it, then iterate and refine.

For me it was a subject matter expert, and then it became the developer. I defined a smaller subset of needs, and where we were putting it (IIS at first and then pivoted to external hosting). Then They became my developer and to be fair the sounding board. I brought a list of suggested features, and asked it to:

Talk about some feature additions without actually making them. I want to consider value add, impact on the existing design and finally complication - as in - are we moving away from a simple local solution that uses the page as a base you build our own pages on.

We ended up doing only 2 of those 6 possible additional features.

Download the Site

darkstart-repo.zip from the Github repository: https://github.com/Works4Me-Info/Dark-Start

Alternatively you can always just use https://darkstart.net/ as everything will be local to you not me, after all: