Now

What I'm Up To

Crafting A Site With Custom Code

From August, I was working almost obsessively on redoing Aliff's website. Whilst I do have skill enough to make a rudimentary site, there is a striking limit to what I can create on my own, especially if it involves scripting. I didn't think of it right away, but once I started using an AI search to troubleshoot basic CSS gripes, I wondered if I couldn't give it more complex tasks. I know all my problems are noob-level in the world of web development, but after failed attempts to deconstruct a free web template and trying out other freeware code, someone like me was so happy when I finally had a working burger menu that hides and shows the sidebar on smaller screens.

What I like most is not that the AI can give me working code to paste into my files, but that it can give me working code perfectly tailored to my requests. For instance, I've always wanted a filtering script that can filter items on a page when you click on the corresponding buttons, with a number count for each category. I did find two versions of such a script before (both without the numbers) that I consecutively used on my Ikea page within the past five years. I didn't try very hard to look for other filtering scripts after that, and neither would I have hoped to compose one myself from scratch; but with a single prompt, the AI search could provide me exactly what I wanted in seconds, with some descriptions of what the code does to boot.

I also find great value in being able to ask the search for recommended improvements to any of my existing code, and I find it a powerful learning aid when used that way. It's like having an expert that I can pick the brain of at any time who won't get fed up of my interrogation. If I tried to look things up myself, I would have to sift through many general explanations that don't even answer the questions I had in mind. Of course, the AI search isn't perfect, either. Sometimes when I asked for revisions, it would come back to me commenting on how the code (that it gave me) wasn't written all that well. It can also make contradictory statements between one query and the next.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to promote the use of AI. I'm simply in awe that there exists a tool that can generate code based on sentences that I type in plain English, because the concept is so new to me. With my basic knowledge, I know how to word the requests, but I wonder how it would work if the asker didn't know the exact term for the thing they want to put underneath that other thing, but make it slightly to the left of that big text over there.

I've heard many negative sentiments about AI in general by now. I think if I couldn't have generated that burger menu, I would either be struggling with my 25th attempt on that one web template, gotten lucky with code from another source, or scrapped the burger entirely and made do with whatever I already know how to code. At this moment, what I would feel most guilty about when using AI is that I don't need to rely on another human being for help. But you know, as much as I enjoy performing music for some client's event, I would rather they used AI to create a playlist for their background music rather than engage live musicians and then make us feel really unwanted on the actual day.

This page is designed to be impermanent, meaning its content will be replaced as it is updated. The concept is from nownownow.

Last updated 26th September 2025.