New Site, New Way of Working
AI-assisted programming is changing the way we build apps and write code.
It’s happened again! A brand new website! For those of you who have been following along since the early days, you might remember that the previous version of my site was crafted back in 2011. Ah, the good old days of Django and SCSS libraries like Bourbon and Jeet. These tools were the best of the best, way back then! At the time, one of the cool features of the site was that it was responsive—yes, it looked great on a telephone! How far we've come since then! What we considered modern back then is now just table-stakes in today’s web development.
The New Look and Feel
Fast forward to today, and I’ve decided to give the site a complete overhaul. This time around, I’ve used TypeScript, Next.js, and Prisma ORM—some of the best frameworks available right now. These tools are the best of the best TODAY, and have made building the site both a breeze and a joy. Honestly, the difference is night and day. Not only does the site load faster and perform better, but the developer experience is so much smoother.
A Little Help From My AI Friends
Here's the twist: I didn’t do it all by myself. I had some AI assistance along the way. Enter Claude 3.5 (Sonnet), a popular language model, and Cursor for my IDE. Working with these tools has been a game-changer. I managed to build the entire site, including a custom admin interface to manage blog posts and categories, in just a few days! That's right, days—not weeks, not months. The productivity boost I got from having AI assistance was incredible.
One of the more fun parts of this rebuild was experimenting with the header. In Cursor’s Composer view, I played around with natural language to create something unique, something just for fun. It felt less like coding and more like having a conversation about what I wanted to build.
Looking Forward
I’m genuinely excited about this new way of working. I believe that AI-assisted development is going to transform the industry. As I continue to explore this space, I plan to write more about how AI will impact software development, and how engineering departments will need to adapt their training, processes, and policies to stay ahead of the curve.
For now, the experiment of rebuilding my website using Cursor and TypeScript has been a huge success. I’ve got a shiny new site, a better platform to share my writing, and I’ve learned a ton along the way.
If you're curious about the tools I used or want to learn more about the process, feel free to reach out or drop a comment below. The future is looking bright, and I can't wait to see where this journey takes me!
Happy coding!