Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
This is the first post on a new blog. I archived the old WordPress posts and only kept a single permalink (Capped Returns) which I still have a soft spot for. Everything else felt like noise.
The new home is a Next.js site that my agents pulled out of WordPress, which was a fun process. Point a web browser powered by Claude Code at an old site and tell it to go. The AI still sucks at design and visual tasks so it needed a bit of supervision and intervention, but it was still delightful that it was even possible. Now it lives in GitHub, which makes it easier for me to ship updates.
I also rolled an RSS feed because long live the free and open web.
Will agentic coding bring back the old web?
I am curious whether AI coding assistants will spark a resurgence of old-school technology. DIY blogs, RSS feeds, less reliance on social platforms. Will it make it a bit easier to host your own email or run a server? Will the benefits of doing your own thing outweigh the cost of learning a little bit, now that AI makes it a ton easier?
For me, absolutely. Every SaaS tool I use has a much higher bar to clear to keep me as a customer. Can I replace it with a bunch of scripts, an OSS app or something I build myself.
Derek Sivers has been talking about what he calls tech independence, and it resonates. His argument is simple: a $5 a month server can host your email, contacts, calendars, photos, website, everything. As he puts it, it is worth a little up-front work, like learning to drive. Derek did a great interview on the Tim Ferriss Show about it. Motivated people can start to take more ownership over their technology and be less reliant on the platforms. I think that is a good thing and I hope to see more of it.
Maybe we'll see more people opening terminals and just learning, like in the olden days.
Photo by Senad Palic on Unsplash
The other driver is that increasingly I ask myself how accessible my software is it to agentic workflows? How easily can I have AI assist me in working there? Clicking on buttons and filling in forms is a second class experience to just having the AI do it for me.
AI is the keyboard, not the brains
There is a real stigma on any content produced by AI. Ugh, an AI generated social post. Ewww, an AI generated blog. And I think it's often justified. AI Slop is a thing. People put out a whole bunch of stuff without thinking about it, just trying to farm eyeballs.
I reckon that as these tools become more embedded in regular workflows, the stigma will fade the same way using a drum machine in the 80s did. We're all becoming attuned to what slop looks and feels like and ultimately it's not about the tools used to create it but whether it adds anything useful to the conversation.
Photo by Steve Harvey on Unsplash
I think AI is heading the same way. Using AI to research ideas, to draft, to restructure your thinking does not make the quality less and does not make the voice less authentic, unless you do it poorly. Done skillfully, it is just a great tool for improving the quality of your thinking and writing.
Like coding, I've found that AI assistants have made researching, writing and thinking tons more fun. Which is the other reason for restarting this blog. I have a writing-ideas folder which is overflowing in stuff that I'm fascinated by, and will hopefully be useful to other folks. But damned if I'm going to type out one word at a time and copy and paste it to wordpress, and check every link and crop the right image and blah blah blah.
This post is a good example. I dictated my core ideas on a bunch of different topics. Then I get the AI to format it based on what it knows about my writing style. Go and find the Derek sivers stuff, get some images from unsplash etc. Then it's a full manual edit and a bunch of rewriting as my thinking evolves by grappling with words and ideas.
But the real joy is the git commit, git push, CI deploys the blog. Or the "just go and give me a rss feed" without ever having to think about a wordpress plugin ever again.