Rebuilt in an Afternoon

This blog is old. It started in 2013 on Octopress, then sat for years on Jekyll, parked on GitHub Pages. Every small change meant fighting Ruby versions for an evening, so I mostly stopped making changes. For a year and a half it didn't move at all. I'd open the repo, remember what touching it cost, and close the repo.

This week Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4 and made Claude Code generally available, both two days old. On Saturday, with nothing better to do, I pointed it at the blog.

I figured I'd spend the afternoon babysitting a toy. That's not how it went. I told it the site was a creaky Jekyll thing I wanted moved to Astro, English and Spanish side by side, and then I mostly watched. It read the old repo. It worked out how the thing was wired. Then it tore out the Ruby, stood the whole site back up on Astro, set the two languages next to each other, and fixed a few things I hadn't mentioned were broken. I read the diffs as they scrolled past and said yes, and by the time the coffee was cold the blog was rebuilt.

Not patched. Rebuilt. The thing I'd avoided for a year and a half, done between two cups of coffee.

I keep doing the math on it. A few years ago this was a contract: two weeks and someone you paid, or a month of my own evenings I was never going to spend. Saturday it was an afternoon, and I spent most of the afternoon watching.

Here's what won't leave me alone, a few days later. It isn't that the blog is back. It's that the cost of "rebuild the whole thing" fell through the floor this week, quietly, on an ordinary Saturday, and almost nobody noticed it happen. The work didn't get a little easier. It changed category. It went from something you schedule to something you just do.

And if that's true for a blog, it's true for the long list of things people never start because starting costs too much. That list is about to get shorter. I don't know what comes out the other side of it. I know it began this week, and I know I'm already on the new side of the line.