A while ago I decided I would put up a blog to write about my ham radio involvement. Being a technical blog, I wanted a classic blog layout without a lot of glitz and fanfare. I tried using WordPress but found it had grown into a monster trying to be all things to all people. Being a systems programmer, I thought I might build my own simple blogging system.

The backend and database part was well within my wheelhouse. However, I have little experience with the programming and styling technology used in websites. I thought I had the perfect solution when I started a project at work in Microsoft’s Blazor, which uses the same technology in the front and back end. But it was too clunky and still requires a lot of styling expertise.

Recently, I hit on the perfect solution while experimenting with using AI to do some routine programming for me on my work projects. As I became more familiar with how to get the best work out of AI, I decided to have the AI write the entire front end of the website, including the styling. I call this an alien encounter because these AI systems are spookily brilliant but not human. You interact with them in the kind of conversational English you would use with a knowledgable colleague. But they are alien enough that you have to learn how to work with them to keep them on task and give you accurate and useful results

I set up what is called a Headless WordPress on a hosting facility. It’s called Headless because all it does is maintain the database of all your content and has the logic to serve it across the Internet to some other site via an API. (I will explain the concent in a subsequent post).

Then I hired Claude to be my $20/month hotshot front end programmer. Claude is the AI system offered by Anthropic. I had long exploratory conversations with Claude on what technologies he would use and where he would get his styling. It was so compelling that I decided to take the leap and have Claude develop the entire front end in the latest web programming technology for which I have only a passing understanding. I was to produce no code at all.

The end result is what you see now. Through a series of “chats” with Claude, we built up an extremely high quality attractive blog front end. It is a React client written in Typescript using a set of components and styling called Material UI. It is fully responsive (meaning it folds up nicely when you use a tablet or a cell phone).