I have been wanting to revamp my personal site for a while. I wanted a more modern look, sure, but also a reorganization of the structure and navigation. The problem was tediousness:
- I can do CSS, but I need a lot of back and forth to get things looking how I want.
- I wanted to continue using HEY World for managing my list of subscribers, but I wanted my articles to live at my personal page.
- I wanted to collect and include other stuff I have done, such as videos or open source projects.
None of this was difficult to do, just tedious and monotonous. I would have rarely found the time and energy for it. If it wasn’t for AI, that is. Hey Claude:
- Check my YouTube channel and create a jekyll collection for videos. For each video grab the title, description and URL.
- Render an activity timeline with all my posts, videos and open source projects.
- Grab my open source projects and include those from github/basecamp that are public where the first commit was mine. Use gc or browse them if gc doesn’t work for this.
- Create posts from my hey personal page. Download the images too to the /images folder. Convert HTML to markdown in the process.
- Suggest ways to make the hero section more modern… Oh, try (2), render a diagonal line below the hero.
- …
A couple of work sessions of maybe two hours each, and I had what I wanted. Claude browsed the page served live by jekyll (with the new Chrome extension), generated and ran python scripts under the hood, and attended hundreds of indications about what I wanted in natural language.
I know that, at this point, none of this should be mind-blowing. But the thing is that it is.