I finally brought myself to develop certain features for this blog which I wanted to do for some time, having a button to toggle light/dark mode, being able to permalink page sections, having a button to copy page content, etc.
I always have a tendency to procrastinate with cosmetics, so I developed a habit to mentally force myself not to care about looks and instead focus on the actual content. Doing the changes I have pulled off in the last 2 hours would have been impossible in pre-LLM era. So I kept the awful default Jekyll Minima theme, and did not spend more thought on it. I had actually went through many different themes in this blog before, and I had switched to Minima precisely because of that: I was spending too much time.
I really like designing things visually. I had interest in typography while studying, and I even went as far to design a font, write all my notes in LaTeX, etc. Then I found out that such skills are not valued in the world, and had no luxury to dwell on such things anymore once I started working.
But now it’s different. When I can do what I want 10 times faster with 10 times less attention, I can just do the design I want. Before I thought it was a flex to use default themes, because it showed a) that the person does not care and b) that they had more important things to do.
Well, now my opinion has changed. In the era where making something look good takes a few hours, using a default theme means something else to me: lack of taste.
For this blog, I just vendored Minima and let gpt-5-codex rip on it. Vendoring pattern is getting more popular with libraries like shadcn, and I expect it to be ever more popular with open source libraries, with AI tools becoming more prevalent.
I don’t expect simple frontend development to be in a good place ever again. I don’t expect anyone to outsource simple static site development to humans anymore, when you can get the exact thing you want at virtually no cost.