AI built this

I built this with AI. Thrice, actually.

Today you see a static site generator (Astro), words in Markdown, one font, one accent color, almost no JavaScript. My first version didn’t make me feel like this one does — my dunce-capped design tastes had been skipping class since bootcamp.

“Make me a React site,” I probably told the agent before I got splashed in the face with a hydration runtime, 186KB to render a placeholder for a parallax background-type frontend application. It looked oddly like… every SaaS website I made during the fintech mobile wars of the 2010s. It never shipped.

Eventually, I only gave constraints. Only code that contributes — every byte auditable, every dependency on trial. I stopped building and started legislating. AI began to live under my code of Hammurabi. I stopped arguing with agents then. And it found me Astro! React lost its job to twelve lines of JavaScript, the fonts collapsed to one, 2,464 lines left the repo. Same model both times.

Eventually, I let it serve me. I let the AI interview me: what does “done” mean, who is this for, what launches and what waits, what should an empty page say. This curious, genius partner was tightly looped into my quickly changing tastes. Fast iterations at the earliest possible loop built my taste before it built anything.

Code is never the hardest part: write your laws before your wishes. Make the AI interview you until your desires have edges. Build taste first.

the code is ai written, the decisions are cyborg, and the words are mine.