Well, hello again.

Over the last 17 years there's been a few iterations of dylanwilbanks.com, including the version that was just an HTML outline pushed to its dumbest limits, and the version where I spent way too much on Framer to deliver a buggy mess and a messy portfolio that never got me a job.

So, we arrive at this new one. And I have very mixed feelings about it.

On the one hand, it's cleaner, greener (color-wise, not ecologically), and finally gives me a single place to point to for my writing, presenting, and designing. It's far less buggy than Framer, and costs a whole lot less. It's built in Astro with this here blog running in Ghost.

On the other hand... I used AI. Claude Code to be precise. I've had my hands in building the site, but not the way I used to, more touching up things here and there and writing new content. Most of the work has been with the very AI that is creating a lot of agita as the Tech Lords chase whatever hollow tech bubble victory they're after.

And... I can live with it... I think?

How has using AI (and specifically Claude Code) helped me?

• It can handle the debugging I hate doing. Of all the positives, this is the one that gives me the most joy, because debugging is an eternal frustration for me. I never realized how anxiety-producing it was to do it myself until I told Claude "here's a syntax error, how would you fix it?" And it was fixed. Correctly. (OK, it took two tries because it only fixed half the problem, but still correctly!)
• I can design in words as well as pixels. It's not that I don't like pixels, but so much of design isn't pixels, it's process, understanding, context. The Figma-fication of 2020s design led us deeper into the territory of production work. That's where design's value lies — not in painting pixels, but making sure the pixels solve the problem (or if pixels are the best solution).
• It consolidated all the links to what I've written. I could have searched for a couple hours trying to dig out every blog post and article out there on the internet that I've written. Claude did it in 10 minutes and async from me. It scraped my Framer site (since those fools don't let you export your content, much less your site). I had to edit what I got back, but the two hours of digging everything out from the web turned into 30 minutes of me cleaning up words and summaries.

It's like having a junior developer with you. A very junior one. Maybe a college intern. You can't just give it the keys – you need to be in control and able to correct it along the way. You need to understand what's happening, and you need it to understand what you want to happen.

AI is about augmenting humans, not replacing them. The human stays in control, the AI assists. Computers shouldn't make decisions that humans should be making. As the IBM training manual said four decades ago, a computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.

The Tech Lords disagree, and it's going to bite us all. It is now, as AI's poor decision making and lack of moral responsibility is ruining life on Earth. There's AI-for-everything and no sense of what AI should be used for and what it's good at. With Claude Code, I found a solution to an actual problem I had. Maybe that doesn't justify the AI boom... and honestly, it doesn't. But it does say AI, when it augments human capacity, has a role going forward. And just as soon as we turn all of the world into datacenters and power plants I'm sure we'll all have some other role it can take on, I mean, other than An Economic, Political, Social, and Environmental Catastrophe In The Making.

Anyway, to sum up, welcome to iteration number I-lost-count of dylanwilbanks.com. I used IA. It helped me do what I needed to do, because it augmented me instead of replacing me. I'm happy it helped. I'm sad and unhappy it helped. It has a role in the future of design, content, and code. It also may be the end of us.