I Have a Confession: I Built This Site with AI – Please Forgive Me

I have two issues with AI coding. The first is how giant trillion dollar companies are profiting off the accumulated labour of mostly open source developers who mostly offered their work for free. Open source had this pattern too but there was a kind of give and take that is not present here. The other is the atrophying of my own skills. That’s one of the reasons I don’t use it for my side projects since it’s become a requirement in my day job and I don’t want to forget how to code.

This creates a grey area for things like a personal blog. If you’re not trying to maintain skills, yeah I wish we could avoid supporting these companies, but I can’t be a hypocrite seeing as I have to use them for work, and I use my provided account as a personal tutor to learn cool stuff.

“I've learned a lot about using a tool like this but the biggest result is that development has lost its joy. There were no challenges, there were no puzzles, no hurdles to overcome. The biggest lesson is that software development is now about the destination not the journey, the journey is for the agent. If that's the case then the joy now has to be thinking about what is possible. I have built features into this site that I never would have on my own.”

I really appreciate these words. I am not a professional developer, and my code to this point has been limited to VBA and writing excel formulas (if that’s even coding).

I’ve recently started work on a full-blown Mac App. I’ve had the idea for years, but never the expertise. It’s not something I’d ever pay someone for either, mainly because it would be expensive and I don’t know if there’s a market for it. But I got a Pro subscription, fired up Xcode and got to work. Within minutes I had a proof of concept. Less than a month later, and I’ve got what I consider to be a nearly finished app with more features than I’d ever considered.

In the interim, I’ve also vibe-coded up two quick single-page web tools to my (and my wife’s) specifications. Things that I could describe, but would have taken me so much time to learn and build that I just wouldn’t have bothered.

This is a silly post. No one is forcing this guy to do anything. He did it because he didn't want to take the time to learn to do this all himself or simplify his expectations so that he'd have to learn less. Or he did it because he wanted to and liked the way the website looks and it was easy and he may not actually care too much about the ethics (at least not as much as who ever he's asking forgiveness from).

I always feel bad and guilty when coding with ai support or with an agent. This is the new way and things can be done that seemed impossible but I always have a bad feeling

Your mission is not to build software, it's to share your collection of cool typewriters with the world. And your AI built website helps you do that! It shares your YT channel, and now I know a bit more about typewriters. Thank you for building your site with AI and for building your collection with passion. Do you have a typewriter room somewhere?

>or they can't figure out how to become profitable after all this.

The AI white pills will argue they already are vastly profitable - although they always, always leave out the small detail of externalities (AI R&D costs and data center-related capex). Of course if you remove the two largest costs, the thing will be profitable.

My intuition is that ultimately the US federal government sustains the whole thing financially, and profitability questions will be dismissed for as long as it continues to do so

It's just a matter of time. The time you get freed up by these new tools are going to be used by new things, possibly learning something even more complex, and that also includes, potentially, creating more complex software and experiences.

No one is saying nowadays that they feel bad when they code in a high level language that gets converted to assembly with a compiler, wondering about the loss of not knowing how to code in assembly anymore. Because... most people didn't want to actually code assembly at the end of the day. They did it because it was the means to an end (produce software).

Of course there are people who love code in assembly and coding in whatever language with their own hands. For them, maybe the code itself IS the destination. Nothing wrong with it. It's just discovering who you are and how do you want to enjoy your own time. The same can be said about anything in life, not just code.

Speaking of means to an end, previous to AI, I've been using already existent CMS for my web projects. Be it Payload, Strapi, Directus. It was always painful, I've never enjoyed it, but something I had to do in order to get the frontend rolling for me and clients. Now I can literally architecture backends (with their own frontend!) from scratch with sqlite, bun, and minimal libraries. Control is tighter, much easier to achieve personalized experiences for each website, less buggy, creating tests suites for even the weirdest edge cases is a painless process, I'm not dependent anymore of the direction the CMS maintainers decide upon. Being able to mold shape a backend this way creates, for me and my clients, a far better experience. All while leaving more time for what I enjoy much more, which is fiddling with the UI/UX and fine-tuning down to the pixel the frontend itself with my bare hands :)

And, bit by bit, humans start to lose.

My problem with AI is never going to be "It replaced Squarespace for small websites"

the real risk with an ai built personal blog isn't getting hacked, it's what happens when something breaks and you have no mental model of the code to even know where to look

I forgive you.

Thanks for your perspective on things!

> To be clear, none of the content, but the site engine itself is all AI built.

Feels a bit odd to apologise for this. I mean the only downside is you might get hacked if you don't understand your code or what it might be missing, but it's a personal blog, so I don't really see what real damage this would do or why you'd have to apologise for trying something out, whatever tools you use.

If you'd used AI to generate the content that would be a different matter, and is what people complain about as it is killing the internet. Instagram for example is now completely infested with AI generated slop, posting huge dollops of slop under videos that nobody ever reads.

You know how we used to have little badges on sites like "built with react" or occasionally Wysiwyg editors?

Why not just have that at the bottom for whatever agent you used. That would give a good picture of the state of the art of agents and tooling and devs could show off their set up in a standard way.

I recently redesigned my own blog (https://minimaxir.com) during some experiments into how well modern LLMs can be conditioned into not outputting the stereotypical telltale designs of web vibecoded slop; it worked well enough (although more difficult than expected) and "how to design a website using agents that doesn't look like an agent made it" might be a fun topic for a blog post as there were a few gotchas.

The main reason I did the redesign is because my blog is running Hugo + PaperMod theme, which is becoming too popular and it makes blogs no longer stand out. There were also a few features/shortcodes I wanted added (better video support, better sidenote support, etc) that give me more tools for blogging.

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Why is that on HN at all?