In 1997, my mom signed me up for dial-up internet at a small local ISP, and it included “homepage hosting”. I’d already been on the World Wide Web using Lynax (a text-based browser), over free dialup to the local Medicine Hat College… where I had used up all their bandwidth, resulting in our account being cancelled. So I knew all about HTML and thought it was awesome and immediately started working on my site.

A few vestigial limbs of that 1997 site still exist in the Wayback Machine, but most of it has been lost to time. Thankfully. Although it has sort of gone out of style now, I’ve had a personal website in some form or another since then. It’s been nearly 30 years!! I experimented with early javascript, making dynamic menus and other flickery animated content. I coded cgi-bin’s, Java Applets, Flash animations, and Silverlight plugins. I made sites in FrontPage, and I used a pirated copy of Dreamweaver to hand-code my HTML and CSS for many years.

In 2002 I registered unknownroad.com for my personal site, named after a Pennywise song. I had a blog there, although it’s not online anymore (too cringe to think about, now). When I started my PhD in 2006 at UToronto, and focused on academic life, my DGP lab website became my main homepage.

Of course when you graduate, you tend to lose those accounts (thankfully they still host mine). So in 2011 I registered rms80.com and made a new site with Wordpress. I just couldn’t get into Wordpress, though. Trying to get all my old content into this new system felt like so much…work. During this time, from 2011 to 2016, I was working at Autodesk and very active on Twitter and having a personal website felt kind of unnecessary.

But in 2016 I left Autodesk to start gradientspace corp, and suddenly having a web presence seemed much more important again. I looked around at “modern web technologies” and thought…it seemed complicated. I was listening to podcasts by this guy Merlin Mann and he was always talking about how great Squarespace was. So I decided to try it.

Squarespace is great. But it was still significant mouse-labor to try to get all my old content there. So much copying and pasting and uploading images and formatting and oh it doesn’t support this or that but if you google enough you can find a workaround etc etc etc. I had intended to write there, but that didn’t happen either. For some reason the WYSIWYG editor prevented me from ever finishing anything - I have lots of half-finished-but-nicely-formatted essays, and not a single post.

Enter Claude Code

In 2018 gradientspace went on hiatus and I joined Epic Games, and then left there in 2024. Twitter had become (at least in my circles) pretty dead, and BlueSky did not really take its place. I wasn’t getting my posting-thoughts-on-the-internet fix from either of those places anymore. And so my eye turned back to rms80.com. But there was still the Squarespace problem…

And then in January of 2026 I decided to try out this Claude Code thing and see what all the fuss was about. And holy shit it built me a very functional web app in an afternoon. This wasn’t intended to be a Gradientspace Corp product, this was a personal project and I had nowhere to really put it. Getting it onto Squarespace seemed real difficult. And so I asked the Robot, how do people even do websites these days??

The Robot said, use Astro. Use this theme, write in Markdown, and it will automatically rebuild every time you change anything. Then put it on Github, and this Netlify thing will just automatically pull changes and publish the public site. It sounded amazing! And Claude Code claimed it could even copy over my old site for me. What!?!

Enter Frustration

As I said, Claude Code and I had already been building a relatively complex web app, and it was doing an amazing job. Part of the reason I wanted the new site was so I could post about how that project was going. Copying a website sounded like it should be trivial for this Robot. So I said to Claude Code, ok do it - make this Astro site and copy all the content from rms80.com.

Claude went off and tried. And Claude Shit. The. Bed.

The first problem was that Claude simply could not extract most of the content in the Squarespace pages. Now, I’ve looked at the source, and I can be a bit forgiving about this. It is very convoluted in there. But Claude couldn’t even find embedded YouTube URLs. I can search for "www.youtube.com/embed/" and find them right away. But Claude was lost.

The second much worse problem was that Claude insisted on copy-editing my text. I tried everything I could think of. “Copy the text verbatim, change nothing” I begged. I pleaded. I copy-pasted the page text into separate markdown files and said “paste this text in exactly as it is with no edits”. Claude would claim it was copying my text verbatim, as I had asked. But secretly, Claude had opinions. Claude clearly felt my text was substandard. Claude made it more concise. Claude embellished my accomplishments. Claude straight up lied!

I didn’t hang onto most egregious editing, but here’s an example that ended up in github. Original text on the left, and Claude’s copy-edit on the right. It starts out ok, but by the end it is straight up fabricating this Makerbot 2X issue, that never happened (and makes no sense!).

I guess it felt that I was not interesting enough. Frankly, I feel a bit judged. In the end, I had to use this quite helpful Paste HTML to Markdown page/app to migrate my text over by hand (gross), and insert the images and videos myself. A small price to pay, I guess, but I’m still kind of mystified that it can do so many other amazing things, but not “just” copy text.

Claude’s Redemption

Claude was super helpful at improving the standard Astro theme & layout, like properly floating images and videos so text would wrap. The site is using “Tailwind” and I still don’t really know what that is, but Claude does, and it tells me things like ‘add class=“not-prose” to the div’ and my problem goes away. This part is magical to someone like me who has conceptual understanding of modern web technologies, but would otherwise have to head to google to figure out any one of these individual problems.

One feature I used very heavily on Squarespace was inline image galleries with a lightbox view. There are some examples on my Cotangent.io site, which is still on Squarespace (currently…). I went looking for Astro lightbox components and found PandaBox, which is pretty spartan, and not at all what I was hoping for.

However, since this was code, Claude could go to town on it. I asked it to change the component to show one image at a time, with prev/next controls and a thumbnail strip below, and boom the page reloads and it’s there. Make the thumbnail strip configurable? no sweat. Add captions? done! Add properties to control widths and heights, aspect ratio, float support, etc etc? It all works.

With very little effort on my part, the Robot turned this basic-but-functional image gallery component into something exactly like what I was imagining. At this point it’s better than what Squarespace has, in my opinion. An example from my GSGraph project is shown on the right. If you are making an Astro site and have a use for this, you can find my modified PandaBox component on Github.

Is “Web Tech” Finished?

I remember when “Webmaster” became a job you could have…and when it disappeared. When I was at Autodesk Research, we had a budget for 80k to build the (old, deleted) autodeskresearch.com site. It was outsourced to a “Web Design Studio” that did a bunch of custom development to adapt an off-the-shelf CMS to our requirements. We had to spend a lot of time figuring out those requirements, so they could give us a quote, and then we had to figure out how to deal with the mistakes in our plan, and ultimately a spend a lot of time fixing what was delivered.

I can’t imagine doing it that way anymore. Claude Code and I could build that kind of stuff in a weekend. I’m sure it would be janky at first, but we could fine-tune it to perfection. We don’t even need to know what we’re building at the start, because it will happily make changes as we discover the requirements. It will never be “done” with the project, there will be no “hand-off”, it will never ask for more budget.

I’m not sure I even needed Astro for this website. Maybe I could have just asked it to build a markdown-based static site generator. Do I need Tailwind, or could I just let it do the CSS directly? I don’t actually care how it works, or if the code is “good”, or if anyone else in the world has the same “stack” as I do. As long as it turns this text into a webpage that looks OK, the job is done.

For those ~30 years since I made my first website, layers of web tech have been developed to make the lives of web developers easier - CSS, Javascript, jQuery, React, and hundreds more. This software helped us humans deal with the insane complexity of the web. Although it was never my main job, I spent countless hours learning and debugging web stuff. Figuring out tables and divs and browser-dependencies and AJAX and styling and responsive design and…the list never really ended.

But now a software robot can take care of all that complexity for us. It does best using the most standard, lowest-common-denominator stuff. It straight up told me I should use standard React for my web app because it wouldn’t know newer frameworks/etc as well.

It’s very weird to think, oh, I will never have to figure out any more web technologies. I shouldn’t even spend time trying - I should just ask the Robot. It knows what to do.