Updating a 3-year-old project with Gemini CLI

I wanted to see what Gemini CLI could do with an old project, so I pointed it at my Astro Neumorphism template, untouched since 2022. I originally built this theme for the AstroJS community, but it was stuck with outdated dependencies. The results were surprising, within minutes, it went from outdated to production-ready, all by simply talking to Gemini CLI.

The starting point

The project was stuck on Astro 1.1 with a deprecated Deno adapter. Just by telling Gemini CLI to update the project, it:

• Analyzed the outdated dependencies
• Identified the deprecated @astrojs/deno adapter
• Suggested migrating to @astrojs/vercel for the existing Vercel deployment
• Started executing the migration plan

What Gemini CLI did

In minutes, just by writing natural language commands, Gemini CLI:

• Updated all dependencies to their latest versions
• Migrated from Deno to Vercel adapter in the config
• Fixed breaking changes (like the deprecated @astrojs/vercel/serverless import)
• Resolved Preact compatibility issues
• Cleaned up the obsolete GitHub Actions workflow
• Got the build passing again

Gemini took care of everything that came up, deprecated imports, version mismatches, and config updates without me needing to look anything up.

Visual improvements in minutes

Once the project was working, I asked Gemini CLI to make some visual improvements. Just by writing simple requests, it:

• Fixed the broken avatar image on the About Me page
• Updated the outdated "Astro 1.1 is here!" text to reflect the new version
• Made the GitHub username clickable
• Created a dynamic star count component that fetches real-time data from GitHub API
• Added proper placeholder images for posts without images

Andrej Karpathy

@karpathy

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The hottest new programming language is English

8:14 PM · Jan 24, 2023

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As Karpathy said: the hottest new programming language is English. I just described what I wanted, no code, no Stack Overflow. Just conversation.

The result

What used to take hours, migration guides, fixing dependencies, updating the UI was done in minutes.

The 3-year-old project now runs on the latest Astro, clean and up-to-date. AI tools are evolving fast. What felt like sci-fi a year ago is just... Tuesday now.

Check it out