My website was put together with a text editor and a “better done than perfect” attitude. I added new things here and there. Fiddled around. Over time, it got messy. And I never built a dark mode, because I feared the time it would take to rebuild everything.

But you’re looking at a much improved site. Maybe even in dark mode. And I can’t begin to describe how much fun I had just willing it into existence.

There’s a slider with interview guests! I told Claude to just go ahead and build me a WordPress plugin.

I can create as many sliders as I could possibly want now. With different image formats. I can just select articles, or I could overwrite headlines. And later, when I introduced dark mode, I asked it to update the plugin.

Paul Ford (who wrote a legendary 38,000-word piece on “What Is Code”) on his new obsession with vibe coding: He’s building apps on the subway that he’d once have billed clients $350,000 for. “It stings to be made obsolete, but it’s fun to code on the train, too.” (New York Times)

I’m not (yet) steering multiple agents at once. This is not a chatbot or a super modern web application, it’s just a WordPress website. Rather oldschool. But it’s mine and I love it. Here’s what went into it:

  1. On my WordPress website, I installed the plugin All-in-One WP Migration. You can download a backup of your whole site.
  2. I installed Local on my computer, a free app that lets you run a local WordPress instance with the click of a button.
  3. You guessed it: I installed the plugin, imported my backup, and had a copy of my site running locally.
  4. With Google Antigravity, I made a template, just one HTML file and a CSS file, and decided on how I wanted everything to look. That’s Gemini 2.5 Pro working in the background, not some Ultra Pro plan, just the normal one.
  5. When I was happy, I ran into a rate limit. I put the two files in my local WordPress theme directory, fired up OpenAI Codex, and pointed it to the folder. I told Codex to look at the new HTML and CSS and then work on the WordPress index.php.
  6. At this point, it’s only fair to point out: while I’m not super familiar with modern web development, I know my way around PHP, WordPress, HTML, and CSS. Which means: it’s not that hard. Especially not with a helpful chatbot.
  7. The refactoring of the old theme with Codex in tandem went really well. Ask it to do something, ask it questions, clarify things, back and forth.
  8. Could the code be cleaner, the stylesheet better organized? Yes, a thousand times yes. At one point, I asked Claude Code to check on the work of Codex, and I got at least a couple hundred redundant lines removed.

I wanted to build a bookshelf and just did. I wanted posts to have pictures that stretch to the top of the window and just did. I wanted to have a fun glossary and got one.

I couldn’t help myself and built some easter eggs. And another one. And one more. But that’s for you to discover.