Full transparency: most of the site was AI assisted. I’ve built sites from scratch before. I’m indifferent to front end coding and I don’t fancy sitting with JS and HTML/CSS to formulate a UI I like, and AI could achieve what I wanted. 84 commits since the last post, around 21 different themes across them.
It started because I wanted to make a wiki, for whatever reason, and Claude gave me $100 in usage for free that expired in a week. So I was like, may as well try Claude Code out and use the money. I thought it would take an evening max.
The old site gave off the vibe of a sales bro who got ahold of an AI and was going to start drop shipping. The interface had friction, things changing sizes, quality of life stuff not there. After the first ten commits the whole website was altered. There wasn’t really any going back until I had something I was at least okay with.
None of it was a bad day. I would look at the site, make a list of changes, make it into a prompt, send it off, and go back to whatever I was doing. Every thirty minutes or so I’d look again. It was an endless circle of it not being good at all. There were some awful looking versions of the site. My actual notes back, in order: “a textbook seller or a USPS info page.” “Just made it look like a blob.” “Words on a blob.” “We aren’t touching eras, we aren’t transcending shit.” “Looks like a Lizzie McGuire movie website.”
What I gave it was an emotion I wanted the website to hit when I looked at it. Yep, rough read for the AI. Augustine has a line in the Confessions about time: if nobody asks me what it is, I know. If I try to explain it, I don’t. That was my whole week. I knew exactly what I wanted the site to look like right up until I had to type it.
Then an idea I had in math class got brought to life. I got out my reMarkable, jotted down a screen sized rectangle, put four boxes of different sizes to hold the navigation, and arranged them in a Fibonacci spiral with a gap between them that made a plus sign. My idea was to have Matrix lettering coming down the page and across it, one letter differently coloured, so if the user hit a button and timed it right they could read a sentence of my choosing. In my head it looked like the Matrix with a perfect placement of boxes. What I got was a ton of empty space and glitching letters trying to move and clumping up. I am not even joking, it may have been the worst thing I have ever laid my eyes on. Sobered me up even. I am awful at drawing. What I drew was a stick figure, and in my head AI was going to make a Picasso.
The thing that made me go back to my roots was listening to Grillz by Paul Wall and Nelly. I was making a playlist, saved a picture of an old Suburban with giant chrome rims for the cover, and realised sites used to be so cool. It wasn’t about how smooth it was. It was in your face, with layers. I kept saying I wanted depth and a good colour palette. I was grabbing album covers for palette choices at the start of the whole journey and never found anything. Album covers gave me colours that look awful without context. The chrome rim gave me every player’s dream.
It was past my bedtime when I saw the first version. I said wow, this is a great seed, but the site needs work. I spent the next day or two editing it, changing layers and buttons.
I wrote about loops a week ago. This was one. Ten commits in, the site was broken, and I could not put it down until it wasn’t, and I didn’t have the words for what “wasn’t broken” meant, so it took 84. It cost me study time. All I did in terms of CTFs was sign up.
It’s done. It looks amazing. There may be small tweaks but nothing major.
If you want to make a website with the help of AI and need pointers, you let me know personally and I will give you everything I know in the form of a voice memo. Maybe even a video if you’re lucky.
Also published on substack.