Side Quest: Inn to Inn Trekking

October 27, 2026

This one isn't a job application story.

This is just me messing around because it's 2026 and I'll be damned if I have to resort to a physical map book for a vacation plan.

The trip

My husband and I are planning an inn-to-inn trek through the Scottish Highlands. For anyone not familiar, inn-to-inn means you trek during the day, but instead of camping, you stop in a cozy little inn or B&B with a shower, a warm meal, and a bed instead. Much more my speed ;)

In terms of which trek (there are some cool ones to choose from) we decided on the Speyside Way, which runs from Buckie to Newtonmore and passes through whisky country. Pretty hard to argue with.

Then we started planning, and discovered that the tooling for this is... limited. Meaning the best tool was a physical map book.

This is the map available on speysideway.com - even if you zoom in, there are no POIs and it's hard to tell if you can get from the trail to a road.

The problem

There are services that will plan the whole thing for you. That's great if you want someone else's itinerary. We didn't. We wanted to:

Pick our own stops, including staying multiple nights somewhere if it's cute, or doing a whiskey distillery tour day
Have real lunch stops on as many days as possible, so we could sit down for a real meal instead of eating a squished sandwich from a backpack
Have bathroom access mid-hike. As a woman, this isn't completely non-negotiable, but it's so unfair that men have it way easier- and if I can plan this, you better know I will.

We asked the most customizable service if they could do that. The answer was, more or less, a hard no.

Google Maps doesn't have the Speyside Way on it, so it's hard to know which towns are actually accessible from the trail. After an hour of flipping between the official map and Google Maps, eyeballing distances in my head, I hit my limit. Time for an excuse to try some shiny new tools.

This is the accomodation tab on the official speyside way tab. A bit helpful, but not really if you are trying to figure out if theres a good mid-day stop and such.

The tools

Devin, especially the cloud agents that can work simultaneously on different machines. I used both Desktop (local) and Cloud to compare them head to head
CI, because my little projects have been so small and it's been a while since I've included testing (tsk tsk - gotta keep up on that!)
Greptile for automated PR review. Because it's fucking awesome

I set ground rules in an AGENTS.md: every change goes through a PR under my GitHub account, no agent merges anything, and everything gets linted, typechecked, tested, and built locally before it's pushed. I also capped review rounds at three, because I don't have a budget for overdoing Greptile.

What I built

Check it out live at inn-to-inn.com. So, its a static React + TypeScript + Vite site, I used MapLibre for the map. When you make your plan, the whole thing lives in the URL (so no need for a db, and you can save and share it without auth). It shows the real trail with each day in a different color, day cards with climb and descent, and stops only at actual towns and inns. Hotels get a "Stay here" button with a nights stepper for multi-day stop overs. The map marks if you have to pack a lunch or if there is a lunch option reachable in the middle of the day's hike.

Zooming in and seeing various POIs on my new site

All the data is pre-generated by scripts instead of live API calls: trails from OpenStreetMap, elevation from OpenTopoData, off-trail routing from Valhalla, and POIs from Wikidata and Wikipedia. OSM is incredible but not perfect. There was one place I really liked the look of (The Old Manse of Craggan), but it was too far from the trail to be picked up - so I added a manual POI mechanism. I might do that for a few more things - after all, I am a lady of refined taste 🤣

Devin Desktop vs. Devin Cloud

I tried to keep the sessions smaller and self contained, so it ended up being about ten local sessions and seven cloud sessions. Cloud could spin up its own page and actually look at the site for errors, which matters on something this visual. I could also have multiple cloud agents working independently on different branches - yay efficiency! It also attached test videos, screenshots, and preview links to PRs. I loved it.

I would have highly preferred Devin Cloud... if the limits weren't so constraining. Maybe it's better for enterprises, but I kept hitting the limit mid-task and couldn't finish anything without waiting hours for my usage to reset.

To be clear, local was great to use too! I was able to get a ton done through it - however, the Devin SWE-2 High model was free throughout this project, so we'll see if local gets just as limited when that promotion ends. Fingers crossed it does not become too constraining…

The struggles

I feel like the biggest struggle was the cloud usage limits - it was so annoying to get started and see how great it is going, and then just abruptly stop that task for hours at a time.

Greptile ghosted me! (sometimes). When I added Greptile to the project, it did a review just fine for the next PR… but then it ignored several PRs in a row. The local sessions were fine, but every single cloud PR was ignored. It turned out it was because the local ones went up under my account. I tried config changes to make sure all PR authors were accepted, I tried status comments, I tried copying another repo's setup that was working, and finally manually tagging @greptileai. What finally worked was re-opening the branch under my own account. Finally I figured out that Greptile bills per developer. I am guessing that because I am logged into the github CLI on my local environment, that was a different author status or author than the cloud one, which was being submitted as a bot.

Greptile is still the best though, and when it did review, it found real bugs, including an HTML injection through a crafted share link ( D: yikes!!), a startup crash when browser storage is blocked, and swapped lat/lon coordinates in a detour that my tests passed anyway.

The popup wars. The map interaction took six rounds of feedback. Clicking a pin also triggered the points of interest hiding under it. MapLibre's close-on-click closed the popup I had literally just opened. The "+ Add" picker closed when you clicked a suggestion. Changing the route left stale popups offering actions for days that no longer existed. Basically, it was clunky for the area you were focused on, and the UI was hard to follow exactly what you were adding and removing. So with several iterations I gutted a lot of the pop-ups and features, but I think now it makes a lot more sense. This all could have easily been avoided if I spent more time thinking of the UI and had a plan upfront. Instead, I left it up to the AI to do the initial design, and while it did all work, it was the nature of this project that made a normal pop-up experience annoying.

The Google Places detour

Not really a struggle - but I did want to integrate Google Places for more restaurants and cafes. This was a new API for me, and I was really worried about cost after hearing horror stories of things going viral, and the google api console didn't help: the daily quota isn't adjustable, budget alerts don't enforce caps, and the spend-cap UI did not make me feel reassured. So I put a hard request cap directly in my fetch script, plus a billing alert and API key restrictions. That ended up not mattering anyway because its not calling the API on website hits… but still.

Anyway, the integration did work! But on localhost the map was spammed with things that don't help a hiker, like holiday homes for rent (not ideal for one night for someone hiking through) and gas stations listed as restaurants. I kept the branch but left it unmerged. I'm still deciding if I want it, and if so, how much custom filtering is worth it for a personal project that probably isn't going anywhere.

In conclusion...

I think Devin is my preferred coding tool. I've still got a few new things on my list to check out, but it was a delight to use. Devin cloud is so incredible if you can pay for the usage. Greptile is worth it. What else… I guess Scotland seems really cool and you should all check out the treks there too! I also added the Great Glen Way, and plan to add a few more. Keep an eye out.

Check it out at inn-to-inn.com, and if you plan a trek with it, I'd genuinely love to hear how it goes.

Anyway, I shipped it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯