It’s a new year, and more than ever, I want to simplify and focus on a few things rather than spread my attention too widely. This applies to my consumption habits–more books and movies, fewer reading articles on my phone or spending time on Reddit or YouTube–and also to work: I have a few big goals for the year and will strongly resist being moved off track as disruptions inevitably appear.

One of my “big goals” for this year is to keep using AI in my coding. This website is a good sand yard for that, as the stakes are somewhat low, so I can vibe engineer away changes without worrying too much about losing anything. It’s still a static site in Jekyll, so all my blog posts are stored in Git and on GitHub. It’s very, very difficult for me to make a serious error, meaning I can play a lot.

So I started this afternoon and polished off a number of changes:

  • Removed search. I had fun using Fuse.js to add search to this website last year, but ultimately I think it’s a distraction, and most people aren’t using it. Out that goes.
  • Broken Links. I fixed a bunch of broken links–link rot is so annoying and persistent on the internet–via TripleChecker, which is a useful service I periodically pay for. It runs regular scans for typos, broken links, and more. Yes, I could wire something up to do this locally and on each commit. I probably should. No, I don’t feel like doing that right now, and it likely wouldn’t be as good anyway.
  • New Projects page. This has now been added, so my About page isn’t as lengthy. I’ll likely add more open-source stuff here in the future, but it felt like a good all-in-one place for the things I’m working on.
  • Updated Reading page. I updated the reading page and plan to be more diligent about logging what I’m reading, writing reviews when inspired, and just reading more in general. My pace has gone down over the last few years, for understandable life reasons, but I want to really get it back to my previous cadence. And part of that is reading more fiction; not everything has to be technical nonfiction on history, economics, or programming.
  • No more green links. All the hyperlinks to other webpages are just underlined and in black. No green.

If you’re wondering how I work with an AI agent on all this, congratulations, that is exactly the right question to ask. It’s one I’m focusing on this year: every time I have a conversation with another developer, I ask, “What’s your workflow?” How are you getting the most out of agents? Where do you see strengths or weaknesses?

In my case, I went very lean back and started by asking the agent for recommendations on how to improve the site and make it more minimal. Then I asked it to put the ideas in a standalone Markdown file that we would iterate on. And then I went through the ideas, either accepting the idea of having the agent focus on just one task at a time or ignoring it. Once a specific task was done, that’s a Git commit.

So, in short, lots of questions, lots of not letting the agent just vomit up code, lots of personal reviewing, and lots of commits so I can look back on all this and understand what happened.