How I built this blog with agentic coding

i've been meaning to build this blog for a long time.

not blocked on anything. i knew what i wanted it to look like. it just kept sliding down the list, under work, under other projects, under whatever was louder that week.

that's where most of my ideas go. not to bad ideas. to the backlog.

this one got done in about three hours of focused work.

where it started

started with a design. opened paper, sketched out what i wanted. minimal, centered, black and white. a small corner of the internet. nothing fancy. fast, clean, mine.

then instead of setting aside a weekend for next.js setup, tailwind, and copy pasting motion code from an old project, i opened claude code and just described it.

how it actually went

i'd say "make the projects row scroll with a soft fade on the edge". it appeared.

i'd look at it, say "the fade's too heavy, make it dissolve gently". it adjusted.

back and forth in minutes.

the whole thing came together like that. the motion carried over from my old site. a proper writing setup so i can publish from a real editor. pinned posts. dark mode. the works.

i wasn't no longer writing boilerplate code.

i was making decisions. this shadow, that spacing, this word instead of that one. the implementation just kept up.

what actually changed

i use ai for most of my work. that part isn't new.

what's new is what it does to the small stuff.

the side project you keep deferring,

the tool you'd use every day if it existed,

the blog you've been "getting to" for a year.

those used to cost a weekend each, so they never got a weekend.

now they cost an evening. so they get done.

the bottleneck used to be typing. now the bottleneck is taste. knowing what you actually want, and noticing when something feels off.

that's a much better problem to have.

so, first post.

if you're sitting on something you keep pushing to next month, it's probably a three hour job now. go check.

more soon.