Rebuilding My Website With Codex

Introduction

For a long time my personal website was… fine.
Technically it worked. But it was minimal to the point where I sometimes wondered if it was doing more harm than good.

It was something I had built pretty early on, not long after college. Just a basic site using plain HTML, CSS, and a bit of JavaScript. At the time that was enough. Later on though, as time passed and my work evolved, the site didn’t really evolve with it.

I knew I wanted to rebuild it eventually. I just kept putting it off.

Not because it was impossible, but because it felt like a bigger lift than I had time for.

Full-time job, family responsibilities, a young child — by the end of a long day the idea of migrating a site and setting up a new stack felt like more work than I wanted to take on.

Recently though, something shifted.

The Project I Kept Delaying

Toward the end of college I had started experimenting with a few newer tools. One of them was Astro. Around the same time I had also been playing with Tailwind for some small class projects.

Even back then I liked the idea of it.

Astro felt clean and fast. Tailwind made building layouts quicker once you got used to the workflow. My thought was always that someday I’d move my site over to something like that.

But “someday” stretched out for quite a while.

Part of it was time. Part of it was just the mental overhead of converting everything. Even if the site was small, migrations always come with friction. New structure, new tooling, decisions to make. It becomes a project.

And when your free time is limited, even small projects can feel bigger than they actually are.

Looking back, I think it was less a real obstacle and more a perceived one.

Where Codex Changed the Equation

More recently I started experimenting with Codex.

After a bit of messing around with it, something clicked.

AI tools are interesting on their own, but they’re far more useful when you already understand the domain you’re working in. I studied computer engineering, so coding itself isn’t foreign to me. What I’m very aware of, though, is how much time it can take to build things properly.

And time is usually the real constraint.

What Codex gave me was a way to work in short bursts. Instead of sitting down for a long coding session, I could move the project forward a little at a time. Ask questions, generate pieces, iterate quickly, and keep momentum.

It felt less like starting a big project and more like gradually shaping something.

In a weird way it removed the psychological barrier that had been sitting there for a while.

From a Barebones Site to Something Useful

Over a relatively short stretch of time I went from that old vanilla site — the one I was honestly a little embarrassed by — to a fully deployed Astro site.

Now it has structure.

It can host blog posts.
It can showcase projects.
It links out to the things I’m working on.
And it actually says something about me when someone lands on it.

Which is really all I wanted from the beginning.

It’s still simple, but it feels intentional now.

The Real Value of Tools Like This

The part that’s been most interesting isn’t just the finished site. It’s what tools like this make possible.

For people who are busy — and I mean genuinely busy — a lot of good ideas never get built. Not because the person can’t do it, but because the energy required to start feels too high.

AI changes that equation a bit.

It doesn’t replace knowing what you’re doing. If anything, it works best when you already understand the fundamentals. But it does speed up the parts that usually slow you down.

Less friction.
More iteration.
More progress in smaller windows of time.

That’s been the real shift for me.

Closing Thoughts

Like most things I work on, I don’t really see the site as finished.

It’s more of an ongoing project. Something I’ll keep refining little by little.

But what used to feel like a project I’d “get to eventually” is now something I can actually move forward regularly.

A few minutes here. A small improvement there.

And strangely enough, that’s been the biggest benefit of all.