I love having a personal website, and am writing this so more people feel empowered to create their own.

My goals for a website: I wanted a place to blog, share musical creations, have a work portfolio, and share other projects as they come up. Designing and creating a website makes me feel artsy! I also think it’s a good way for friends to learn about what I’m up to and thinking about.

I was mainly trying to build a site that was very customizable and very cheap to run. The result is that I bought my domain on Namecheap, use GitHub as the hosting service, and code on my machine with lots of help from AI. The product is what you see!

Below are some steps I followed.

1. Create a basic GitHub Pages website, then clone it to your computer.
2. Download VS Code and get the Codex extension.
3. Go wild with vibe coding.
4. (optional) Get your own domain name on Namecheap.
5. (optional) Set up a comment section with Cusdis.

You can ask any LLM¹ to elaborate on the above steps for more details. My website content is entirely open-source and can be found here. Or email me to chat about the process!

If you’re someone who wants to build your own website, I’d offer the following thoughts:

• Think about what you want, first. For others, it’s possible that starting a Substack newsletter is good enough for you; or maybe Blogger is where it’s at; or perhaps Google Sites.
• Have a bounded scope. With web development, there’s always more you can do – so I recommend having a clear vision of what “success” looks like for a minimal viable product for your website. After that’s launched, you can think about version two.
• Ideate and develop with AI! The barriers to creating a website or doing anything with code are lower. I know, that sounds like some kind of startup tagline. But really, it’s pretty sick.
  • Since I “learned” how to vibe code, I’ve been able to focus purely on the vision, design and “product management” of my website (where I’m “managing” the LLM agent that’s doing the coding). Initially, I copied and pasted from the internet, until I caved and started paying $20 for the OpenAI Codex extension that goes straight in my IDE². It’s proved extremely powerful and capable of debugging the deepest bugs that I’ve previously been stuck on for months.
  • LLMs can also point you in the right direction early on. The more you tell it, the more helpful it is. These days, you can upload images and the LLM will figure out the rest.
  • Directing LLMs is a bit of a skill, but one that can be easily learned. I recommend having a clear ask; work feature by feature; and if it’s not working, be more specific, or give a picture of what you’re looking for. Most of the time, you can just give specific instructions and let it cook for a few minutes. Then, bam, you have a website!