2026-06-27

Hello, everyone.

For years I used the hello-friend-ng Hugo theme for this page. Though it’s a beautiful theme, I never truly liked using an existing theme. Sure, I could always customize it, but I always wanted one 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 it a chance at creating a theme from scratch?

I started out with a simple ask of generating a “terminal-style” profile page. Its first outputs were super generic. I went back and forth with the agent on further customizing it, asking it to “make the colors funkier”, making the sections “stand out”, adding a “dark mode button”, etc. Within a few hours I finally had a page that I truly loved!

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

This excited me so much that I decided I would write a blog post documenting this successful AI experience. Where and how would I add a blog section?

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! This is where Hugo shines.

I asked AI to migrate my page to Hugo. It broke down the single page’s contents into respective HTML, CSS, JS, etc. files and fit them to Hugo’s structure. Though I had used Hugo for years, I had never taken the time to learn the structure of a Hugo theme. I love that this experience pushed me to finally learn Hugo, and that AI was able to use my page as a personal example for doing so.

And now I am successfully 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. It can personalize examples to help you learn, you can ask it dumb questions, it can search codebases, etc.
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 throw ideas at a wall and see how something turns out. Experimentation can be expensive, this makes experimentation basically free. Experimentation is fun, but AI allows you to better allocate your time for the experiments you actually want to do manually.
4. You don’t have to start with a solid prompt to create something useful. You can iterate on it, ask it to try things, it will make suggestions to you, etc. Just start somewhere and keep looping on the output!

Yes, AI is rapidly changing things for software engineers, but the pace of technological advancement has always been fast… It hasn’t been long since engineers paid for compilers on CDs. Or since the Internet was created. Or since the Great Pyramid was built, if you consider humanity’s ~300k-year history.

AI is just meta-programming.

We should make an effort to learn this budding technology, but we should not stop learning how to code. Machines make mistakes, human actors will always be required. Instruction sets are not human consciousness.

This was my first time outside of work using AI for coding and I consider it a Saturday very well spent.