Case in point: personal website development

I've been maintaining my personal website since roughly 2022. It has been a three-year journey of constant iteration. Every six months to a year, I pause to review where I am in my career, assess my current design tastes, and shake things up. Sometimes it’s a minor tweak, sometimes a complete overhaul. The site has evolved from a fancy digital CV to a playground for quirks and interests, and eventually (in theory, at least) a blog.

But what stands out most in this latest iteration is the sheer velocity.

Revisions that used to require days of grinding are now measured in hours. A process that once took me two or three days now takes a mere couple of hours. This acceleration is entirely due to the advancements in AI coding tools. By the way, this isn't another "AI is going to replace jobs" think piece; it is simply an anecdote of my experience in the specific domain of personal website building.

The evolution of workflows

"Evolution" is perhaps an understatement for the delta between my workflows in 2022 and today.

I remember selecting Vercel and Next.js for the first time. Back then, having CI/CD set up automatically upon a git push felt like magic. Deployment was solved, but I still had to do the heavy lifting. I was writing raw React and JavaScript, manually handling logic, and hunting down free UI components. My "automation" was copy-pasting CSS buttons. It was less painful than vanilla JS, but still a laborious feat.

Then came GitHub Copilot. It was mystical, sure, but it mostly offered autocomplete suggestions. It wasn’t mind-blowing yet.

Then came the massive unlock: the age of "Agents" - Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex. We moved from "tab-and-edit" to full-blown coding agents. Simple prompts that once generated only function-scoped snippets now bring entire projects to life. I can edit multiple files and components in one fell swoop. The pattern is pretty clear: the levels of abstraction are just climbing higher and higher.

Piecing together products, not code

Looking at the bigger picture, coding is merely a means to an end: creating a concrete product. In my case, that’s my personal website.

We now have tools that allow AI to be deeply incorporated into design workflows and coupled closely with engineering. Instead of piecing together code, we piece together products. As a single person (given we have some level of taste), this changes everything.

My current process involves Google's Stitch. Stitch is a UI builder to vibe-create mockups. I then feed those mockups into Gemini. I use Gemini essentially as my graphic designer because its vision capabilities and design understanding are unparalleled. From there, I hand the logic over to Codex, which acts as a smart coding agent to execute the implementation.

I barely touch the code in the traditional sense. I don't get bogged down in TypeScript or JavaScript syntax anymore - which saves me the mental context switching since my day job is mostly in Python. The features of a personal website aren't so extensive that they require bespoke, hand-crafted solutions. This allows me to stand back and direct the AI, moving from 'writing code' to 'orchestrating the product.

(Stitch recently dropped a feature called Predictive Heatmaps. It runs an instant attention audit on any screen you design to see where users will look before you write a line of code. Pretty cool feature.)

The cusp seems infinite

Standing here in 2025, reflecting on this website allows me to see how my own workflow has matured. Today, I stand firmly behind AI tools. I use them almost every day.

I’m looking forward to taking it to the next level, Orchestration.

Tools like Conductor allow you to run a team of coding agents on your Mac. Based on their docs, we can spin up parallel agents working on independent branches, flagging us only when they need attention. We review their code, check who's working, and just... conduct.

As workflows keep evolving, we will never arrive at a consensus. What was a stagnant workflow for years (VSCode, text editors) is now splintering into really interesting directions. Some go back to TUIs, some to intelligent IDEs like Conductor.

One thing is for sure: I’m strapped in, and I’ll continue on this ride.

See you in the next iteration.