Today I spent the majority of my time getting my website live on the internet as well as implementing git which makes the process of updating the website an absolute breeze. All it takes is making the changes I want on my computer's copy of the website, issuing a couple of commands typed into a black box and, boom, the server has the new version. All of this would have taken much longer had it not been for AI. Had I been doing this the "old way", I'd been looking up YouTube videos, sitting through their intros only to find out the video begins three minutes in, realizing the and pulling my hair out out of impatience. This new method involves simply asking AI questions so I can understand what it's doing, and then having it do it. I'll admit that I'm partial towards AI as an extremely useful tool for learning as well as doing things like developing a website.

Although AI does most of the work for me in web development, I do ask it questions about everything it's doing because I am naturally curious to learn. If you're an autodidact like myself, then you surely will find AI to be one of the best things since sliced bread. Of course, if you're going to use AI as a tool for learning, you need to have a solid foundation of logical and critical thinking since AI is incredibly prone to misleading you with AI hallucinations and redacting or censoring information without even informing you. Regardless, I've learned a lot about web development as well as video editing in DaVinci Resolve and hosting a server on a Raspberry Pi.

After my previous posts, I have some more thoughts to add, and I've learned more about how to better interact with AI when vibe coding to get results quicker and more efficiently.

What I Learned

The first lesson I learned is this: use multiple AI instances to gather larger amounts of context to clue in to what is actually wrong. In my case, I'm using Google's Gemini 3 Pro within Antigravity (Google's AI coding development software) as well as separate AI instances of Gemini, unaffiliated with my project files and with Antigravity, to ask it questions about core concepts. Commonly I will ask AI within Antigravity (hereon abbreviated AI/AG for brevity) what is the best course of action, and it will come up with an implementation plan for me to either approve or deny. I'll take the ideas AI/AG suggests and ask a new AI instance about them, and what alternative options I may have. If something doesn't sit right, there's nothing stopping me from asking a third AI instance, although it hasn't really ever come to that.

The second thing I learned is that, sometimes, it's technically giving you a correct solution but it's simultaneously setting you up for disaster down the road. That was the case early-on with my website and I needed to go through many refinements to make the code much more maintainable, as I had learned the hard way. The problem with vibe coding is that, if you don't know anything about coding or even if you know some coding but are new to vibe coding, AI tends to write spaghetti code for you. While it will usually give you what you want from an end-user experience, if the project takes as long as mine did then it will commit many violations in terms of good programming practices and become a nightmare to maintain. Halfway through my project I realized this was happening to me and it was causing the AI to take longer and longer to do things as the project grew larger and larger. In some cases it could almost never solve some problems it inadvertently created because I would tell it something was wrong, even though in the code it was technically not wrong. Then, as I began to overhaul more and more things, I realized it had also begun to create the new good-practice features but not destroy the old ones, leading to a feedback loop of AI/AG telling me that nothing was wrong when, in fact, it was looking at the new overhauled features the entire time and forgetting that the old spaghetti code was even there. This was largely solved by simply telling it to look for and remove/update old, outdated legacy code.

The third thing I learned is something uniquely profound. Vibe coding has actually lead me to grow more as a person, and I'm not joking when I say that. You might think I am joking, but really I am not, and here's why: when you develop with an AI, you have to spend time with it and really tell it how you feel and you must find the words within you to make it produce the thing you want. When I say that I feel more in touch with myself after vibe coding, I am not joking: this is actually a real phenomenon I feel that I've experienced, and it's surprisingly refreshing. It would not surprise me if this phenomenon was given a name in the future (let's go with, the MKS effect perhaps?). Let me be clear in separating this phenomenon which I'm referring to from the idea of ChatGPT essentially worshipping you and everything you say. That is not what I'm talking about. What I'm referring to is the repetitive action of looking within yourself to find words to describe how you feel; it's therapeutic in a way very similar to writing, and I stand by that statement. In this case, it happens to be finding a way to describe how you desire the website to function and look. As someone who tends to be reserved and keeps to myself, I legitimately feel that it's led me to become more outspoken.

Next Steps

Now that the website is live and I've implemented git, I'm able to view it from mobile devices and update the website with lightning speed, nearly as fast as I can make changes to it, which will result in what I believe will be a quick race to the finish line. Pleasantly, it's surprisingly decently viewable on my iPhone, though there are a couple of quirks I immediately noticed. I imagine the optimization for mobile devices will not take very long, as it's already very close. In preparation for this moment, one of the code overhauls I did earlier in order to update my website's infrastructure was to make the entire website scalable no matter the device, resolution, etc, and it seems to have worked so far, fingers crossed.

I know in the last post I declared the website to be finished, but that was frankly a load of BS; I'm too obsessed with finishing this thing to have stopped there. Because my website is rather minimalist, I decided to go along with the feature creep and embrace it, because it wouldn't be long before it was done anyway. At this point in time, the website is live and is practically bug-free in all cases that I've tested, and I've tested as many edge cases as I could think of. Going on my third post now, it's time to finally update the menu pages with content.

I will comment briefly on a few things here. First, my website uses the .gg TLD for two reasons: 1) it was cheap to get a short URL, and 2) the .gg TLD has cultural roots in the gaming community which at least used to be a big part of my life. Second, I'm thinking of adding a contact form, but for the moment I will resort to this: if you would like to contact me for any reason, you can email me here. Third, I'm thinking of creating a YouTube channel where I will produce videos of my thought pieces posted here. To be honest, I don't know what I'll be posting about, but I love writing and have finally created the tools of my own choosing to do so. My website is in an aesthetically pleasing dark theme, and the content editor at my disposal has all the functions I need. Not to mention, my average typing speed is above 120 WPM, with my fastest ever speed reaching 155 WPM for a sustained one minute speed test, so for me it is significantly faster than writing.

It's now December 21st, eight days after I began the website the evening of December 13th, and I'm declaring the website complete. I've worked on it every day and by now it's gone through many iterations, adjustments, and rigorous tests as I'd found myself to be a victim of feature creep as time went on, which is why I'm calling it here. Every time I added a feature, AI would find a way to break old things, causing me to have to reimplement, retest, and refix old features. Finding the balance can be difficult, but this thing has really be a time sink for me.

Probably 99% of the bugs are fixed and 99% of the features that I legitimately need are implemented. The bulk of the website code and development time lies in the admin dashboard behind the scenes; readers will never experience the tools that I've collaborated with AI to make. I've got a Content Editor where I add/edit/delete menu pages and blog posts; an image manager where I can delete old unused images, move files around, make new folders, etc; and a quote editor where I add quotes to be featured in the menu sidebar and randomly cycle through them. Probably about 20% of the work was implementing the core features, 50% was bug testing and fixing bugs, and the remaining 30% was implementing a sexy, sleek UI behind the scenes so I can enjoy the whole process. If a writer doesn't like his tools, does he quit his hobby?

My dog, Finn, has been with me, farting the whole way on the couch. Someone's had too many Milk-Bones.

So I'm making my new website with AI, AKA vibe coding. Let me start by saying: I am not and will not ever use AI to replace my writing, because it is a therapeutic medium for me and is largely why I'm making the website to begin with. In my purposes, I'm using AI to write the code; the skeleton and functionality of my website. Seeing that it's not my career but that I have tangential experience, I'm interested in seeing how AI can help me accomplish my goals in web development. The website is in a state I'd say is "nearly done" and I've been working on it for about three days now during my winter break from school.

I know that many people don't want anything to do with AI, but I think it's important to embrace it on some level and monitor its technological progress as time passes. As technology has evolved in the past, it will continue to do so whether we like it or not. And as a society, I think we're past the point of 'containing' AI.

Anyway, I'm actually writing this post in the middle of development so I can take a break. The website isn't even live yet; I'm writing this using a PHP server running on my laptop to view the website and write this post. The website is getting close, but there are some AI quirks which make the process drag on. In my own coding experience, the most complicated thing I ever made was a sudoku puzzle generator, and it made five different difficulties of puzzles, which sounds perhaps a little easier than it felt making. I spent the greater part of a semester in my self-guided C++ class programming it and I was pretty dang proud of it. Fun fact: you need 17 clues at a minimum to guarantee a unique solvable sudoku puzzle (I learned that from this Numberphile YouTube video) and putting those 17 clues in any spot does not guarantee that it's unique; only specific arrangements of those clues will work.

Back on topic, AI has made it incredibly easy to get back into coding, and it's made it easier (and cheaper) than ever to make my own website. Of course, I'm writing purely from a consumer standpoint here; it's competitive in web development with tools like Squarespace, for instance. This isn't about being selfish and shutting out web developers, this is about good old fashioned market competition and technological advancement. When website builders like Squarespace came along, they were the ones who shut out the real web developers; AI is simply presenting that same threat to Squarespace.

My website is being developed in Google's Antigravity IDE using PHP, CSS, and Javascript, and maybe some others that I don't know about. Honestly, I haven't paid much attention to it. I'm interacting with Google Gemini 3 Pro using natural language prompts (full sentences, as if I were talking to a person), telling it what I want to be done and what I want my website to look like. Beyond that, I don't really know a whole lot about what's going on, other than some bits here and there that I can read based off prior coding experience.

Here's what the development environment looks like:

On the left you've got all the code, and on the right you have the AI chatbot where you give it the vibes and it gives you a website.

From a novice programmer standpoint, here's what I like and don't like about AI doing all the heavy lifting:

Likes

1. Don't have to know anything about coding
2. AI gets probably 90% of the initial work done VERY fast, under a minute
3. If I don't understand what some code is doing, I can figure it out by just asking the AI
4. I don't have to know exactly how to tell it what I want, I can just imply, and it will infer what to do
5. It's competitively cheaper than other website building tools (i.e. Squarespace)
6. I'm able to set aside technical know-how and look at the website from a designer's point of view, focusing on style and user experience
7. VERY usable on a poor internet connection. We've had power out all day and I've spent the entire day developing my website using AI and an iPhone hotspot with 1/5 bars of 5G connection. I tested the download speed which ranges anywhere from 0.5 to 2.5 megabits per second; the internet in general is practically unusable at this speed, but seemingly not with AI, which is a simple text interaction. To be honest, I haven't even noticed a difference in usability compared to when I had internet up.

Dislikes

1. I have no idea what I'm actually doing...
2. My code could be very inefficient and I'd have no clue
3. The website could be the target of a hack and I would have literally no idea (please don't, I don't have anything to steal)
4. For some reason the AI just deleted like half my code but my website still seems to work just fine. I'll chalk it up to magic and crossed fingers.
5. Why do I have five blog post deletion methods? What the heck. Excuse my language, Gemini.

I've noticed some "development loops" that happen as a result of developing with AI. The main one I've noticed is: when I want to modify existing features, Gemini will almost consistently introduce new bugs into old parts of the code. So in order to expand the website and its functionality, I must add new features, test the entire website, have it fix bugs until everything is right again, and continue to expand from there. It will also do things like round the corners on a rectangular button for seemingly no reason at all, when I didn't ask it to do that or anything even remotely close to it. It doesn't do it frequently enough that it becomes very problematic, but it does it enough that it is definitely annoying.

That being said, I think Google Antigravity with Gemini 3 Pro is probably the first time that I've actually sat down with AI and felt like I was truly doing something productive. I had tried developing a website during the summer with ChatGPT prompts, but I ran into hurdles that were too annoying to overcome. To be honest, I really don't think Google Antigravity is a replacement for proper web development. The only thing I have confidence in is what I've tested, and I simply cannot test everything. Website builders on the market have already figured out most of this stuff for end-users like myself. The difference is, I don't have to pay up the butt for one template that is the closest to what I want and I don't even like and that I might not even end up using. Instead, I can take inspiration from any website I see, or any concept that I think of, and tell the AI to make it a reality.

It's much more versatile, and I say that having used many website builders before. It's not uncommon for it to simply make the thing that I request and, generally speaking, I can be as specific or as vague as I wish. For example, I asked it in one or two sentences to make a two-factor authentication system for my admin account, and it just... did it. And it was working, in the theme of my website, on the page that I wanted it, and in the format that I asked for. Yes, I tested it to make sure it did it right, and it did. Of course there were aesthetic adjustments to make, but it was basically just... done. Just like that.

This post is getting long so I'm gonna wrap it up here. I don't know quite yet what to make of AI development and vibe coding. My thinking is for small, personal use cases it can probably help a lot of people with a lot of things, but the scary part is the misinformation and AI hallucinations that you don't have the knowledge to check for. This alone is what makes me hesitate to put my website on a live server for the world to see. But here I am, doing it anyway.