Building My Own Sites

In July 2026, with AI as my pair, I put together a whole constellation of personal sites in just a few days: the storefront (nshidai.com, for writing and collaboration), the garden (right here — a digital garden), the workshop (build.nshidai.com, for products and toys), and the toolshed I already had. This map collects the calls worth remembering from that stretch of work — some are product decisions, others are technical lessons learned the hard way.

How I Thought About It

• Why three sites, not one 🌿
• Wanting to build six isn’t the same as building six 🌿
• Launch one site at a time 🌿
• Every piece of content has exactly one home 🌿
• Visual design is a signal of occasion 🌱
• Honest defaults are a design decision 🌱

What I Learned on the Technical Side

• A concept can have only one source of truth 🌿
• The time paradox of static sites 🌱
• Reproducibility comes from a seed, not from luck 🌱
• Let the AI review its own code adversarially 🌿

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For more general notes on writing code with AI, see AI coding workflow.