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/life

Why I Built This Site

A personal space to think out loud and share what I'm learning.

I have a problem.

Every few years, a version of me decides he needs a website. This version of me is always very excited. He has a vision. He's going to write things. Important things. Things that matter.

He picks a platform. He obsesses over the design. He writes maybe two posts. Then he disappears.

A new version of me shows up a few years later. He looks at the old website and thinks: "What was that guy doing? That's not me at all." He kills it and starts fresh.

This has happened at least five times.

Webflow Marvin. WordPress Marvin. Klaviyo Marvin. Kit Marvin. Substack Marvin. They're all dead now. A graveyard of websites with my name on them.

This is what's left.

What happened yesterday

I was messing around with Claude Code and discovered something: it can deploy websites to Cloudflare Pages. For free. Unlimited sites. Public URLs.

I've been using this to make what I call "learning pages." I watch a video or read something interesting, and instead of taking notes like a normal person, I have Claude turn it into a little website. It's more fun to look at than a Notion doc.

Anyway, this reminded me: I used to use Cloudflare for my personal site. The WordPress one. The one 2016 Marvin built.

So I checked it.

> Error 503: Oh for fuck's sake. Not this again.

The site is completely dead.

And here's the thing: I remembered this happening a year ago. My website has been broken for a year and I didn't notice. I just... forgot I had a website.

The WordPress Years

Let me tell you about WordPress Marvin.

WordPress Marvin thought he was going to "own his platform." He was going to have "full control." He paid for hosting. He installed plugins. He picked a theme. He felt very professional.

Then the site broke.

WordPress Marvin spent hours debugging PHP errors. He updated plugins and everything exploded. He SSHed into the server. He deactivated plugins one by one trying to find the broken one. Sometimes he had to deactivate all of them just to get the site back up.

WordPress Marvin used to build WordPress sites for clients. Maintenance was part of the package. He still couldn't keep his own site running.

WordPress Marvin is dead now. Good riddance.

The new situation

Yesterday I compared it to the world I live in now.

I have Claude Code with a project full of context about my life. It knows my writing style. It knows what I'm working on. It has access to my calendar and notes and half my brain at this point.

I can speak into my phone while walking. A few minutes later, it's live.

I still have a server somewhere. But I never have to SSH into it. I never have to deactivate plugins one by one at 2am wondering which one broke everything.

[*]
note

Wispr Flow for dictation, Claude Code for publishing. I talk into my phone, Claude shapes it, and it's live. The whole site lives in one project, so Claude has context on everything. It's how this post got here.

Have an idea or journal
Speak into Wispr Flow
Claude Code gathers context
Draft article + images/charts
Approve?
yes
Deploy
no
Iterate
loops back
How this site gets updated

The tools finally caught up to what all those dead Marvins were trying to do.

Why this actually matters

I've trained over 12,000 people on AI agents. I'm in the middle of the biggest shift in technology I'll probably ever see.

When ChatGPT launched, I was amazed. I spent all day getting rate limited. Three months later I was on stage speaking about it. Two years of building, teaching, figuring this out in real time.

But I wasn't writing any of it down.

All those insights. All those conversations. All those moments where something clicked. Gone.

The documentation problem

The only way to revisit the past is to document it

I can't remember what I was thinking at 22.

I have no idea who I was at 16.

Those versions of me exist only in fragments. A few photos. A journal entry here and there. Mostly nothing.

But the moments I did document? The journals, the voice memos, the random videos? I can go back. I can see exactly what that version of me was thinking.

Everything else is just... gone. Not faded. Gone.

I'm 31 now.

If I don't capture who I am, what I'm learning, and where I want to go right now, 2025 Marvin disappears too. No record. No way for future me to look back and see what I was thinking when everything was changing.

This article is a gift to that guy.

What to expect

I want to share what I'm learning about AI agents. The bets I'm making and why. Questions I don't have answers to yet. Things that changed how I think.

If you're building in AI, start capturing what you're learning now. Your future self will want to know what you were thinking.