Hey tell you what go check out my Sausage, Parmesan & Paprika/Cayenne Pasta Recipe I really like it, and you might too…
Wait…what?! This is a Developers personal website why the heck would I want a recipe?
I can already hear it! Well that is if anyone actually reads my rubbish little hovel of a website and let alone the posts! But hey I guess that leads me on to todays post, it’s main goal is not for people to read it but just as a sounding board, the fact that others read it is just the bonus!
(seriously though you read this!? I mean I can barely string a coherent sentence together, so you do well to read a full post!)
Why do I even have a personal site
I got into making websites because of how alive they felt. You could just… make a something. Put it out there; Change it tomorrow (or even an hour later). Break it. Fix it. Break it again in a slightly more interesting way.
Any millennial will remember, and I’m aware I sound approximately nine hundred years old saying this, but we had just been given access to a computer and the internet was still semi new, we spent hours where we all had a weird little corner. Early Tumblr. MySpace, or Geocites (well for me it was Freeserve!) all the latter allowed you to have your own space on the web, your own place to call yours you might have no one visit but that didn’t matter it was your own. You could tell something about a person from their website in a way you absolutely cannot tell from a LinkedIn profile.
Then somewhere along the way it all got optimised, gotta make it eye catching enough, gotta get your skills across because attention is limited. Everything became content. Personal sites became portfolios. Portfolios became personal brands. Personal brands became a specific kind of exhausting where everything you post is secretly an audition.
I didn’t want that. I wanted the messy corner back.
What “mine” actually means
The playlists on this site are probably my favourite thing on it, and almost nobody ever looks at them. Each one is a year of my life with a title that means something to me, the wedding one, the lockdown one, the one from the year everything felt like it was finally clicking into place. They’re a diary in playlist form and I love that they exist here on my site not locked inside Spotify’s UI where they disappear into the algorithm, and the sorry state of its UI now-a-days!
The Glitch, CRT, Neo Brutalist whatever you want to call the design, yeah that is right up my alley, is it to everyone’s taste no, but did I go down a proper rabbit hole, and ended up enjoying it so much I wrote a blog post about it. Did it need to exist? Absolutely not. Did I have an awesome time building it? Yes I bloomin’ well did.
The recipes? Look. I cook. I want to remember the things I’ve cooked. My website felt like the right place to put them. I didn’t want an app and I have opinions about owning your own data. Moving on.
None of these are really well written, or make any commercial sense to pursue them, but really thats the point, risk free fun the site isn’t for the masses it’s for me, and for me (at a push) to share to mates to show the next nerdy thing I built, useful or not! And the thing is all of it just so happens to be public.
The elephant in the room
Here’s the bit I’ve been uncomfortable about for a while, and I’d rather just say it than keep dancing around it.
A lot of this site has been built heavily with AI, like I mean HEAVILY. I’ve been using AI in some form or another on the site for about 2 years now, and you know what honestly it’s changed how I build things significantly. A lot of people in my nerd tech circle and the IndieWeb are probs not that thrilled about AI, and you know what? I get it, I genuinely do. There are real concerns about what AI means for creativity, for ownership, and for the authenticity of the things we make. These aren’t daft concerns at all.
So I want to be straight with you rather than carrying on quietly hoping you don’t notice.
Why I actually use it (the honest version)
There are three reasons, and none of them are “because AI is the future” or any of that.
One: the boilerplate. Setting up a new project, writing the same config files for the forty seventh time, scaffolding out the bits that need to exist before you get to the interesting bit, I don’t find that fun and I never have. Skipping past it means I get to the part I actually care about faster. That’s it. That’s the reason.
Two: it’s allowing me to learn more, faster. This often surprises the people I talk to about AI, but I’ve genuinely learned more about certain topics with AI than I would with just Googling, watching videos or using Stack Overflow. I mean these are obviously good ways to work but for my brain I’ve always struggled. Reading, with my dyslexia I have always hated sitting down and reading technical posts (heck even re-reading my own posts are HAAARRRD!). Watching videos, often my brain is shot and if I’m sat watching a video even though it is more engaging than reading I often find myself just zoning out. But AI, I get super tailored responses to the exact problem or use case, I can ask it questions, I can set up pre-prompts to make sure that it knows I’ve understood a topic before moving on! I understand what I’m building in a way that I’m not sure I always did before. I’m not finding it a crutch, it’s more like a very patient senior dev who doesn’t sigh when you ask something obvious.
Three: and this is the real important one. It’s the thing that finally lets the ideas in my head actually exist. I have a notes app that is, let’s say, ambitious. Ideas for tools, little projects, things I want to build. The graveyard of half-started repos on my GitHub is a thing of genuine beauty and sadness. I work a quite demanding full time job that I love, always pour my soul into it, I have a lil’en whose just about to turn one, and those two factors are the sole reason why by 9pm when I get chance to work on my “for fun” projects my brain is quite frankly a pile of mush, to the point even gaming seems a chore sometimes. You know that thing where you hit a difficult bit of a project, after a long day, and your brain just isn’t there? And you think “I’ll hit it tomorrow with a fresh pair of eyes”? And then something or someone more important needs your time, and you just never go back to it.
That used to be where ideas went to die. AI changed that. The difficult bit isn’t a wall anymore, it’s a conversation. The things I used to abandon I’m actually finishing. That’s not nothing, that’s kind of everything actually, that’s the thing that helps me have my messy corner.
The tussle I haven’t resolved
I still haven’t fully finished arguing with myself about the use of AI in personal work, let alone argued my way out of the judgment from peers and others entirely.
Does using AI to build something make it less yours? I’ve turned this over a fair bit and I don’t have a clean answer. Yes with AI especially LLMs nothing I make is truly of my own creation or a new idea (LLMs can’t really do that, just piece multiple existing things together in a unique combo). But going back to my own creation, I used Astro to build this site and I didn’t write Astro. I deployed it using Coolify and Github and I didn’t build them either. At what point in the stack does the tool stop being a tool and start being a co-author?
I think the people who are against AI in personal/creative spaces are pointing at something real and scary, even if I’ve landed in a different place to them. The concern isn’t really about the technology, it’s about whether the output still genuinely reflects a person. And that’s a fair thing to want to protect. I don’t have a neat conclusion here. I’m genuinely still thinking about it.
For me currently I’ve got my own space back, I’m just enjoying hobby coding again, something I genuinely felt a little burnt out with of late. I’m having fun, and using AI as a tool to help me express that.
Where I’ve landed, for now
The site feels like me. The recipes are real recipes I actually cook. The playlists have a track from my wedding in them and one from the week my sprout was born. The glitch effect is there because I thought it was cool and I wanted to learn how to do it. The posts, including this one, are written by me, even if AI helped heavily on some of the projects I write about.
Case in point: I just spent time getting AI to help me build a tiny animated square that sits in the corner of preview builds of this site. It’s styled after those old IBA cue dots from 80s/90s telly, you know the little square that used to appear before the ad breaks on ITV. It’s got CRT scanlines, film grain, a glitch effect with chromatic aberration, the whole lot. Nobody will ever see it except me. Its only real purpose is making me grin like an idiot every time I open a preview deploy to check something. And honestly? That’s the whole point of having your own site. Here it is, in all its tiny, over-engineered glory:
If it still reflects who I am, maybe that’s enough for me. Maybe the how matters less than the what. Maybe I’ll feel differently about that in a year when the tooling has shifted again and this whole conversation looks different.
But for now AI has given back my messy corner and I love it. Also the Recipes section isn’t going anywhere.
As always, come argue with me about this on Twitter/X — I’m @dr_dinomight. I’ll be up. Sprout permitting.