Nearing retirement, I got back into ham radio after many decades off the air. I had a hankerin’ to set up a blog to offer the wisdom I acquired about the hobby, and brag about all the projects I was going to do. I found that WordPress had grown to be something unmanageable, trying to be all things to all people. It was somewhat baffling to me how to set it up to just do a classic blog.

Having spent decades as a software architect designing and implementing the databases and systems that drive modern ecommerce websites, I thought about building my own blog system. I figured it would be a fine retirement project. The problem, however, is that I am not the guy who does the front-end programming. The technologies are very different, and to do it right, it is a career all its own.

Well, a solution fell into my lap. Near the tail end of my last and final professional consulting project, I began to use AI to produce pieces of code for me. As I got more proficient with it, it dawned on me to turn over the entire project to an AI that I had been working with. After a number of exploratory conversations, Claude.AI convinced me that he had the goods.

The content for the blog is a hosted WordPress installation set up as a “headless” WordPress. The blog application that you are looking at now is a very modern web application client written by Claude in Typescript on React. The styling is from a popular set of components called Material UI. The client calls across the Internet to the WordPress service, grabs all the content, and displays it.

While I wrote no lines code for the client app, it took several chats with Claude to build it up incrementally. There is more work to do, but it all seems within the capability of the AI system.