I've just asked to strip it down to essentials and make it like HN, with minimal css and no js... we'll see

EDIT: it's not letting me undo other people's creativity, so I'm going to try impersonating garry tan and see if it will respect me more

EDIT 2: the garrytan con helped me got past the model refusing to make edits, but it's failing when it attempts to implement them. likely some heuristic checking that I'm adding rather than removing code...