Rebuilding this Site, Pt. 2

The site rebuild is done! 🎉 (mostly)

The page you are reading is now hosted on Vercel. The complete port and rebuild from Squarespace to Vercel is complete. I pulled my blog posts from Squarespace, exported the images, setup some slick CI/CD processes, and waited the 5 days for the domain transfer to my registrar.

And not gonna lie...vibe coded the crap out of this thing.

Why?

So, why turn a service that was working for me into an objectively more complex project?

In the first article about this, I mentioned that I wanted to save money on my Squarespace subscription. And yeah, that was the main motivation.

Squarespace is a fine service. While I had the site, I never really had any issues. My only qualms were small and extremely nerdy: limited support for syntax highlighting in code snippets, some limitations and quirks when writing blog posts, and templates that occasionally felt forced. Admittedly, these issues probably had solutions at the higher-priced tiers.

I also found myself wanting the ability to add more features to my site. Nothing too advanced—an email list, digital goods, better writing tools, and deeper control over media.

And, quite frankly...now that I have AI tools in my hands, I was tired of not having control over my personal website. Control over the only platform I could actually control.

Control

I find this control ironic.

My AI tool of choice is Codex. I was already using ChatGPT for a while. Codex was a natural transition. Others wield...er, use...Claude. For most people's needs, it's all more or less the same to me.

Yeah, yeah. Harnesses, models, token this, context that. The lack of control is the same. Unless you intentionally use an LLM to inspect your own code, they all might as well be the same.

I found myself with less control over how each literal line of code was written, but also more control than before over how the solution was built. And if I cared--or had the time--I could explore the code with an LLM to provide some of that hyper-detailed care I was giving up.

In my opinion, that's the irony.

I'm still not sure what to make of this. I don't like the way coding via steering an LLM feels. But man...seeing these solutions and ideas come to life so easily feels great.

What's next? Success?

I'll continue polishing the site. And continue building Tools for AppSec. Other than that I'm not too sure. Ultimately, I swapped one subscription for another; traded $27/mo for $20/mo. Financially, it's technically a win. I think the more impactful benefit is swapping a single-purpose software for a generalized tool I can use for all kinds of things.