Rebuilding a personal website with AI

This is another example of building a static website with CodeYam, but the approach is different. Rather than starting from scratch with a prompt describing the pages I want, I am redoing my personal website. I previously built it using v0, and I am pretty sure Claude Code. Let's try to rebuild it in CodeYam, modernize it, and get some new designs.

I finish the prompt and link the reference. Since I built the original myself, there is a reference folder we can point at as well. In this case we are doing a website, we let CodeYam decide on the stack, and we ask for help with design. Then we launch the design chat and see what directions come back.

We got the first round of designs. They are fine, but I don't love them. So I went back with a prompt I have used a couple of times before with decent results, asking for another round that gets a little crazier.

The prompt asks it to role play as a world-class designer. You could also give specific examples of sites you want as references, and if there were people's websites I loved, maybe I would do that. In this case I wanted to push the AI a little more abstractly, which can work really well and can also lead to some poor results. I also gave it a link to another site I had built and a photo from my desktop, so it could pre-fill that.

I could go into a specific version and give feedback on that one, but here I wanted to throw the whole batch out and begin again. Honestly that is on me. I could have given more context in my initial prompt, but that is what iteration is for.

I iterated a bit on my own and the variants changed quite a bit, in style and in content. Given that I was having a tough time deciding which direction to go, I took it to our team stand-up to talk with my co-founder Jared, who is our CTO, and our product designer Dani. In the next video you will see the result of that discussion. Spoiler alert, we did not reach a final decision, but it gave me a lot of ideas.