2026-06-27

Hello, everyone.

For years this page has used the hello-friend-ng Hugo theme. Though it’s a beautiful theme, I’ve never quite liked the idea of sharing a theme with others. I’ve always wanted a unique theme of my own.

Over the past few months at work I’ve significantly ramped up my AI usage. With all my recent AI experience, I decided: why not give AI a chance at revamping my page?

I started out with a simple ask of generating a retro style profile page with “terminal colors”. Its first outputs were terrible. I went back and forth with the agent on details like making “the colors funkier”, making each section “stand out”, dark mode button, etc. Within a few hours I finally had a page with a theme that I really loved!

And when it was done, I asked it to “make the code human-readable without changing any functionality”. Though I had vibe-coded nearly all of it, the code was more than clean enough for me to manually modify it later if needed.

Unfortunately, as I had the thought of adding a blog post digging into this successful AI experience, I realized that I had a big problem. How could I fit blog posts on my main page? … Not possible, would be way too messy.

How would I create a separate blog page? Well, clearly I’d create a blog.html page and link it from my main page. But, then I’d have to duplicate most of the code from the main page to make the blog page look consistent with the main page! Argh!

At last, AI had helped me to migrate from the amazing hello-friend-ng theme. However, I had been so busy focusing on colors that I had lost track of why I liked Hugo so much: the ability to rapidly expand a webpage without duplication and messy hacks.

I asked AI how to migrate my page to Hugo. It broke down the single page’s contents into respective HTML, CSS, JS, etc. files that fit the structure of Hugo. Though I had used Hugo for years, I had never taken the time to really dig in and understand the structure of a theme. I love that this experience helped me to finally learn Hugo too, and with a personal example rather than a pre-canned documentation example.

And now I am succesfully making all kinds of CSS hacks despite having not touched CSS in years.

Overall, I found this to be a great example of how AI can be:

1. An amazing tool for learning new technologies. The ability for models to create tailor-made examples to better explain something is just amazing.
2. A huge leg up on tech that I am not an expert in. I am overwhelmingly a backend engineer, it is very rare that I touch any sort of frontend code.
3. A perfect way to just throw ideas at a wall and see how something turns out. We’ve all been there: you have a great idea for something that just really doesn’t pan out after an entire weekend of experimentation. This makes that kind of experimentation basically free.

Yes, AI is rapidly changing things fundamentally for software engineers, but consider it this way… It hasn’t been long since people paid for compilers on CDs. Or since the Internet was first created. Or since the Great Pyramid was built, if you consider how long humanity has been around (~300k years).

Let’s carry on and just try to use the technology as best as we can. We don’t have to stop learning how to code. Machines make mistakes, human actors will always be required. We created them! They have instruction sets and instruction sets are not human consciousness.

This was my first use of AI outside of work and I consider it a Saturday very well spent.