AI did this
Finally! After all these years, I have my own website and blog.
The last time I had a personal site was back when I was a student. And that ended in 2008. That’s 18 years ago. Eighteen. Let that sink in for a moment, because I certainly had to.
It’s not like I haven’t been writing. Since I started working in developer relations at Microsoft in 2019, I’ve published a lot of content: articles, tutorials, videos, talks. But all of it lived on other people’s platforms. I always wanted my own place. A corner of the internet that was truly mine. But between work, kids, open source projects, and music… there was just never enough time.
The AI shift #
With the latest progress in AI coding agents, the world feels very different today.
I’ve spawned more projects, and actually finished them, in the past year than I did in the previous ten years combined. That’s not an exaggeration.
This is wild.
One of the good things about this shift is that I could finally get around to building my personal space. It took two days. Two days, with everything I ever wanted and even more. My vision, my direction, my architecture, my design choices… but 100% AI-generated code. I didn’t even bother to review or read the code, even though I used to be very obsessive about code quality and craft. I gave directions, fine-tuning, architecture, vibe, design — but no code. The AI entirely built this.
A double-edged superpower #
It’s exciting and frightening at the same time.
I can finally bring to life projects I could never justify spending time on. A few recent examples:
- lantern-vscode-extension: I had the idea for this VS Code extension 6 years ago. It sat in the “someday” pile until AI made “someday” turn into “this afternoon”.
- run-on-output: I always wanted a simple way to print the useful info after the log vomit of dev tools. A tiny quality-of-life thing I never would have carved out time to build. Again, an afternoon project while I was working on sample app for my work, where I needed a tool like this.
- imapforward: I would have never started something like this without AI. I would have kept struggling with existing tools not working the way I wanted. But now I just built my own, in a few hours, and it works exactly how I want. And I’m not even worried about the future maintenance.
The paradox of more time #
The promise of AI, in a way, is more time to spend on meaningful things. But for me it’s become something closer to an addiction. I finally get to build all the stuff I ever wanted but never had the time for. So I still don’t have more free time. I’d even say it’s the opposite. 😆
But at least now I have my own place to write my blurbs. Welcome to my corner of the internet. And if you’ve not already tried it, the terminal prompt below hides some surprises…