04 / Design / Building this site
A website shaped by AI and judgment.
A long-running personal site replatformed, redesigned, tested, and released through a deliberately human-led AI workflow.
Live · September 2026 release
- Production migration
- Hugo → Astro
- Design directions explored
- 9
- Pages in the v1.6.0 release
- 34
01 / Migration
Modernize the platform without losing its history.
The site began as a working Hugo publication with years of posts, redirects, assets, and deployment history worth preserving. I moved it to Astro with typed content, static search, RSS, generated social images, and a repeatable migration script that retained dates, tags, and draft state.
02 / Direction
Explore broadly, then choose deliberately.
I used AI to turn competing ideas into nine reviewable directions, from coded homepage studies to complete visual mockups. I rejected options that felt too performative or failed to introduce the person behind the work, selected Terrain, and refined it into the quieter visual system used today.
03 / Roles
Keep a clear division of responsibility.
AI helped inspect the old repository, implement components, generate artwork, exercise edge cases, and document the release. I set the objectives, protected the existing writing, chose what to remove, defined the privacy boundaries, and approved what could be published. The speed came from the tools; the point of view and accountability stayed human.
04 / Release
Treat a personal site like production software.
The v1.6.0 release built 34 pages in a clean checkout and passed type, lint, responsive, dark-mode, accessibility, search, and no-JavaScript checks before a tag-triggered deployment to S3 and CloudFront. The site has continued to grow since that historical release; the process remains the durable part.