I got a little too deep into the AI styling experiments.

The Brutalism post documented the first iteration, which was actually pretty good. But then I kept going. More prompts. More CSS changes. Before long I had a site that looked aggressive in all the wrong ways, with styles I did not understand well enough to modify by hand.

The moment I knew I had gone too far: I wanted to change the heading font size and could not figure out where in the cascade to do it. I was fighting my own CSS.

The decision to revert

I reverted to an earlier commit.

This felt like a failure at first. But the more I think about it, the more it feels like the right call. The site I had was not mine — it was a prompt output I had adopted without understanding. That is fine for prototyping, but not for something I want to maintain and iterate on over time.

The lesson I took from it: AI-generated code (or CSS) is most useful when you can read it and understand it after the fact. When the output exceeds your ability to reason about it, you have moved from “assisted” to “dependent.”

Starting fresh with Astro

I picked up Jason Lengstorf’s Astro for Fast Website Development course on Frontend Masters. One hour in and I am already glad I did. Jason’s teaching approach — minimal scaffolding, explain as you go — is exactly what I needed.

The goal this time is to build something I understand at every layer. Slower progress in the short term. Sustainable in the long term.

The blog will keep running while I work through this. If you see the aesthetic shift suddenly, now you know why.