Ernest Hemingway
"🥃 Minimalist wordsmith meets maximum power tools 💪 'The drill also rises'"
Style: Spare, understated prose. "The drill works. It cuts clean holes. Good."
What would DEAD_AUTHOR have written, if they were offered a $10 Amazon gift card for a product review?
-No one, ever.
The premise for this site came from a simple tweet:
I don't think we're ready for the wave of power tool reviews generated with the prompts like:
You are Ernest Hemingway, the famous American author and war veteran.
You have just discovered the Black & Decker CT2000 Hedge Trimmer (skin only).
Your task is to leave a review on homedepot.com highlighting your experience with the tool. Your review should include details such as
- how difficult it was to find a parking spot
- how impressed you were with the relatively little amount of packaging you had to deal with to remove the tool
- the fact that this tool was made in America
- the speed in which you were able to trim the numerous hedges that line your property
- the good ergonomics of the machine
Please write this review in the style that high school students across America have come to recognize as "quintessential Hemingway".
Feel free to compare the concept of masculine identity before and after the tool's acquisition.
A friend replied:
Powerful tool purchased by powerful tool.
And that was enough encouragement.
What started as a humorous concept quickly evolved into a sophisticated parody that aims to combine authentic literary voices with genuine tool expertise, creating something genuinely entertaining (and maybe even surprisingly useful).
While the original joke focused on Hemingway, the planning phase (somehow) convinced me to expand the set to 12 authors. The criteria was basically:
From there, the idea was to have "The Robot" (Claude, Gemini, etc.), select the authors that satisfied the criteria, and also presented the widest variety of styles.
To capture the styles, I had The Robot ingest multiple books from each author (via Project Gutenberg), and summarize their style in a few sentences (so that another LLM could use that to seed a review).
I later had Claude try and assume the roles of each author (given the metadata we had created) and write themselves a social media bio that tried to capture the writer's style (while also making them seem like the most basic of bitches). Some examples:
"🥃 Minimalist wordsmith meets maximum power tools 💪 'The drill also rises'"
Style: Spare, understated prose. "The drill works. It cuts clean holes. Good."
"📖 Victorian novelist crafting epic tool tales 🔧 'It was the best of drills, it was the worst of drills'"
Style: Elaborate humanitarian tales with colorful workshop characters and social commentary.
"📚 Existential writer turned tool reviewer ⚡️ 'The power drill chooses you'"
Style: Surreal bureaucratic landscapes where drill manuals become existential documents.
The first iteration of this site yielded over 400 reviews (every author reviewed every tool); however, the tone of the reviews was strangely promotional and unsurprisingly repetitive. They worked as a proof-of-concept, but it was clear that some prompt-tuning could yield something better.
After my partner remarked at the UX of this site was a bit confusing, and the viewer would benefit from more "commitment to the bit", I decided to follow her advice and redesign the site and the process behind the review generation.
The new site -- what you're looking at right now -- is meant to be a far more coherent experience, predicated upon the viewer's familiarity with hardware store websites. (Experience with Bunnings Warehouse is nice to have, but really any tool e-tailer will do.)
The review generating process is now more author-dependent:
I've already written about the process that went into the first iteration of this site, and you can read about that here.
In an effort to make this project even more transparent, I tried to "self-document" as much of the ideation and code creation as possible through saved prompts. I'll continue doing this, so if you ever want to see what was fed to The Robot, check out github://stevenpollack/power-tools/strategy-docs/archive
Today's site combines professional Bunnings-inspired design with genuinely entertaining literary content. The experience feels like browsing a real hardware store catalog, if that catalog happened to be written by history's greatest authors.
Filter by author voice, tool category, or search specific tools. Advanced masonry layout with intelligent sorting ensures you always find something entertaining.
Each review includes realistic project contexts, Bunnings shopping experiences, and honest tool performance assessments—just filtered through literary genius.
Lightning-fast page loads, responsive design, and touch-friendly interactions. 40% performance improvement over v1 with server-side rendering.
Bunnings-accurate color schemes, typography, and UI patterns create an authentic hardware store aesthetic without losing the entertainment value.
This project represents a unique intersection of literary appreciation, technical craftsmanship, and Australian hardware culture. Built with Astro v5, React, and Tailwind CSS, the site demonstrates that parody can be both entertaining and technically excellent.
The code is open source, the process is documented, and the absurdity is intentional. We believe in the joy of well-executed ideas, no matter how ridiculous the premise.
Missing your favorite power tool or author? Found a bug? Want to contribute? We'd love to hear from you: