Did I actually build this website?

DevelopmentAILLMWebsite

Rebuilding argv.cloud

TL;DR: I got bored with my website. I wondered how hard it would be to build a new theme from scratch using AI. 1 hour later I had one.

I think the gap between user and maker is collapsing day by day with the proliferation of AI. I built the framework for this website (It’s actually a “Static Site Generator”, or SSG. called Hugo) in an afternoon with the help of Claude Code.

While I was at it, I began thinking of something that has been bugging me for some time: Everybody will be a builder. We’ll soon build our local applications, and some of our work could become decentralized.

The distinction between user and maker is blurring day by day. That’s great.

Context: What exactly did I do?

I became bored with my previous website, which used Blowfish as the Hugo theme or template: argv-cloud-previous.png

Over the weeks, I began searching for new Hugo templates I could use but none caught my attention. And one idea started building up:

How complex would it be to vibe code a Hugo template, from scratch, 100% to my liking?

And so the exploration began, first as a casual chat with Claude itself as a thought experiment. Sort of a brainstorming session for evaluating viability, describing what I wanted, investigating constraints, what was possible and what not, aesthetics…

2 hours later “we” had a working Hugo template, 100% custom. I like this product more than the most beautiful website out there, because it’s mine.

The inner satisfaction was strange. I just bypassed who knows how much time of researching and reading the documentation for Hugo and developing a new template from scratch. Of course I wouldn’t use Wordpress or another CMS because I don’t want to maintain that. Hugo has been with me since 2021 and it’s fairly simple to produce new content.

But did I actually build this? There’s a weird inversion here:

The more everyone can build anything, the less building something means.

Of course, I’ve successfully tackled very complex problems in my profession thanks to AI. But I’m not necessarily speaking of efficiency, or automation here.

Right now there’s a meaningful gap between “I use Notion” and “I built my own note-taking system.” That gap contains skill, time, decisions, taste. It means something. When AI closes that gap to an afternoon, the artifact stops being a signal of anything about the person who made it. And yet, this same artifact is more of an expression of the person who made it. The gap between ideation and creation is now getting smaller and smaller.

What I did today wasn’t “I built a blog with AI”. I made a hundred small decisions, from aesthetics, tinkering with different colors, the very subtle background gradient that gives me (And you) a “mood” in the UX sense. The font choices, the spacing..

Very meticulous decisions that had a north star of:

  • Simple
  • Elegant
  • Less is more
  • Satisfying to read

On a side note, I removed all the visual clutter from the past website with the aim of making it more “sober”, and all my content ended up in this text-centric format. The unexpected shift is that I started noticing how this previous website was so visually stimulating, with great visual content, great backgrounds, that the content became second priority (At least visually). Now, words have nowhere to hide. And I love it.

Execution was very cheap. Taste was my only output.

Is there, then, taste and creativity, our only remaining differentiators?

I think they are. The ability to detect problems, get so immersed in the usage of AI that it becomes a partner to “patch” our digital lives.

Is this the future? Soon we will scratch our own itches, build solutions for our own problems, and if we have an opinion on how things should work, then we will build things ourselves. One interesting thing that I naturally link this with, is Raycast just launched Glaze, an AI solution that will build desktop apps with just natural language. Isn’t that amazing? And strange? That apps will become decentralized, everyone with their own homebuilt solutions? Is it crazy to think this applies to SaaS?