Building with Claude: Fake Precision, and Why My Poems Only Show the Year

While cleaning up my poetry section, I noticed something odd: my poems were dated December 2026. It’s June. My poems were time-traveling. Untangling that turned into one of those small problems that teaches a disproportionately useful lesson.

The problem we were solving

When my 55 Bengali poems were first imported, only the year was known for each one — no month, no day. To get them to sort newest-first, an earlier step had assigned each a synthetic date: December 31, then December 30, counting down. It worked for ordering, but it produced two problems. The 2026 poems were dated in December — months in the future. And the made-up days implied a precision I never actually had.

I’d also just added a new poem, shoishob, and wanted it at the top of the list.

What Claude suggested

My instinct was to give the new poem today’s date — June 18 — to bring it first. Claude caught that this would do the opposite: since the other poems were synthetically dated to December 2026, a June date would sort below all of them. The list was sorted by full date, and December beats June.

So we did two things. First, a small script re-dated every poem with realistic, non-consecutive dates (random 1–3 day gaps), while preserving two hard constraints: each poem keeps its real year, and the existing order never changes. The newest 2026 poem anchored at June 18; the rest walked backward from there; past years anchored at their own December and walked back.

Then, the part I actually like: we changed the display to show only month and year, never the day:

const fmt = (d) =>
  d.toLocaleDateString('en-US', { month: 'long', year: 'numeric', timeZone: 'UTC' });

The full date still lives in the frontmatter — it’s needed for sorting — but the page only ever shows “June 2026.” Because honestly, a poem isn’t a single-day event. Some take days to write. Claiming an exact date would be inventing a fact.

There was also a neat trick for the ordering. To make shoishob sort above another poem on the same day without a cascade of edits, I gave it a later time on the same date:

# sorts first, still displays "December 2026"
date: 2026-12-31T23:59:59Z

(That was an intermediate step; in the final pass it became June 18, the newest of the bunch.)

What I got wrong

I assumed a recent, real-looking date would float the poem to the top. I was reasoning about calendar recency, but the system was sorting against a set of fake dates, so my real date sank. I didn’t realize the data I was comparing against wasn’t real.

I also instinctively wanted full dates on display — they look more “complete.” But complete-looking and true aren’t the same thing.

What Claude got wrong

This mess existed because of an earlier decision Claude itself had made: dating the poems into December 2026, the future, was sloppy. Anchoring synthetic dates at year-end is fine for past years, but for the current year it produces dates that haven’t happened yet. The ordering scheme should have anchored at “today” for the current year from the start. I inherited a future-dated archive and had to fix it.

What we solved

• Every poem now has a believable, non-consecutive date in its correct year — no more future dates.
• The new poem sits exactly where I want it (first), with the order of all the others untouched.
• The site displays month + year only, so it never claims a specific day it can’t back up. The frontmatter keeps the full date for sorting.

Key lessons learned

1. Don’t display data you don’t actually have. Showing only the year (or month + year) is more honest than inventing a day. Honest metadata beats fake precision.
2. Sorting is about the stored value, not the visible one. My “recent” date lost to invented December dates because the sort compared full dates, not what the page showed.
3. Use a time component to break ties without re-numbering everything. A T23:59:59Z nudge sorts one item above another on the same day — no cascade of edits.
4. Separate the value from its display. Keep precise data for the machine (sorting), show only what’s true to the human (the year).