Starting with a Garden Dream

As I mentioned in [Why I Built This Site], this project has been a long time coming, more than a decade, in fact. It started with a humble Blogspot blog and slowly meandered through different tools and frameworks: Hugo, 11ty, even the Obsidian Digital Garden plugin . But then I discovered Maggie Appleton’s site , and suddenly I knew what I wanted. Her digital garden wasn’t just beautiful, it was alive with connected ideas, carefully designed, always growing. That’s when I realized: this is the direction I need to take.

Finding Astro (and the Intimidation That Came With It)

My first real encounter with Astro ~ came through Maggie’s Colophon . The way she described it, the precision, the flexibility, and it clicked with me immediately. But I didn’t feel ready. JavaScript and React weren’t my strengths; I was comfortable with HTML and CSS, but not much more. I took a few Coursera courses , learned the basics of JS and routing, and yet, I stayed stuck in a loop of tutorials. I wanted everything to be perfect before I even began.

I dabbled with the documentation of Astro but I couldnt build what I envisioned in my mind and thats when chat with a colleague introduced me to Trae. For the first time I saw AI in action as part of the building process. That felt like progress, but also a little like cheating.

When AI Felt Like Magic (and Why That Was a Problem)

Using Trae was like rubbing Aladdin’s lamp. Code appeared, things worked, but I didn’t understand any of it. It was like having a wish granted without knowing the cost. That’s when it clicked: if I kept going down this road, I’d never really learn anything. I didn’t want to be someone who built a site they couldn’t explain. I needed a different approach.

Changing the Way I Learned

So I changed my relationship with AI. Instead of outsourcing the work, I treated AI like a teacher or a search engine. If I was stuck, I’d ask it to explain a concept or show me an example, but I’d always build my own version first. I also started thinking in smaller, modular steps. Want to style a heading? Build the base yourself. Get stuck? Look it up, maybe ask Claude for an example, then adapt it until it works, I was familiar with designing reusable components and I used the same approach in building the components and sometimes components consisting of other components (Or Molecules as Atomic Design says).

Not around that time, but recently I read Vibe Code is Legacy Code , which perfectly captured what I was feeling then. Code you don’t understand, even if it “works,” is just future debt.

By breaking things down and using AI as a creative partner instead of a magician, I finally started to make steady progress.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Building this site has been as much about learning Astro as it has been about reframing how I use AI. ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor they’ve been companions on this journey, but never the builders. The work, the mistakes, the learnings that’s all mine.

But AI agents like Claude, Chatgpt and Cursor has reinforced my belief that I can learn anything. I might not be so good at it but it can help me to get started, it feels like I have a personal mentor to whom I can reach out when some concepts confuses the hell out of me.

And this is only the beginning. I plan to write more about the technical side of building this site, the experiments I try, and the things I break along the way. The garden is just starting to grow. Also, Im currently pursuing Hacking with Swift by two straws with the newly founded confidence.