Over the last 3 days, I redid my personal website / blog. I got Claude Code (and some other AI pals, like OpenAI Codex and Warp) to:
- Guide me through exporting from WordPress to Astro
- Import a bunch of posts that I wanted to keep, archiving the rest
- Download and set up the AstroPaper theme
- Tweak various things to my liking, including getting it to recommend colour themes similar to my old site
- Set up various features, like a lightbox and gallery I saw online
- Find, import, and tweak an SVG icon for Threads
- Guide me through deployment to GitHub Pages
If I tried this without AI, my efforts would probably have stalled fairly early on! I know for sure I wouldn’t have been able to get this done, in my free time, in just 3 days.
That’s what’s been so remarkable about AI-assisted coding for me: the ability to just… type things out, and… have them happen. And so. Quickly. This nonsensically fast feedback loop is extremely addictive, and makes me want to keep tinkering and making.
Pete Steinberger (using Astro too, with the same theme) captures this feeling well in his blog post, “Just One More Prompt”:
Yes, you can just do things. That’s the beauty and the problem. Once you realize how powerful these agents are - this realization that you can finally build everything you ever wanted to build. All these ideas and side projects that you’ve been thinking about for years, but never had the time to do.
Anyway! New blog is at yjsoon.com (in case you’re reading this from the RSS feed, which my AI assures me still works). I’ll be cross-posting on LinkedIn, so you can follow my hand-written em-dashes there if you’d like :)
Now, I just noticed from the link preview on LinkedIn that the OpenGraph image needs replacing, so back to Claude Code it is…
