A vibe-coded website

I have been playing around with websites and personal tools for a while. And I enjoyed the process of building. Some became useful tools that I still use today but most were just too much work either to upkeep or to properly solve a problem. Now with AI agents I feel like some of the enjoyment of programming is disappearing. I have been spending a lot less time in the codebase and honestly have not completely worked out how to use AI in a way that doesn’t degrade my skills. It’s hard to see exactly which skill will be useful as a programmer. Knowing syntax clearly is not it hah.

Anyway.. this website was a little experiment in vibe coding. I have been using AI agents a lot. But this is my first completely vibe-coded application. I know all the business decisions and the high level flow. But I have not looked at the code once. I don’t know what framework we used, what the file layout is or anything about the codebase.

This was a very fun little project where I got to play around with some ideas for a personal website. It makes me wonder if that’s the place a developer’s skills still matter. More in the feel of something. Or in the individuality of a product. Something that doesn’t read as “perfect” or “solid” but maybe “strange” or “interesting”.. Now don’t get me wrong. I think a developer still offers a lot of technical knowledge that just an AI agent can’t. But I do wonder for how much longer.

To talk briefly about the website and how it works. I am currently writing this in an Obsidian vault that gets synced to the server with Syncthing and rebuilds the whole website from it. It also has a PDF generator for my CV. So I can at any time from my phone make an edit to a markdown file for my CV and I get it updated on my website along with an updated PDF.. that’s just dope.

I see a lot of exciting potential in this space of personal tools.

I wonder how this shift will affect library and framework use. I can think of a few reasons to use frameworks. It speeds up development, it’s more performant and more safe. I think the speed is less of a factor now. Now the other two are still true for other fields in programming. But for frontend development I think there is an argument to be made for using fewer dependencies.

Just some brief thoughts so I can say I have a blog :)