Marcus Povey

The eagle eyed, and frequent visitors, to this blog may have noticed a little bit of a facelift to my blog! I have not touched my theme for a very long time, and so this was long overdue.

So, while playing around with Google Antigravity, I thought I’d scratch this itch at the same time. So, over the course of a very … tiring… conference call, I vibed myself a new theme.

I figured I’d give the AI a proper test, so rather than make it easy for it, I decided to treat it… well… just like I might treat a regular human dev. I gave a clear description of what I wanted, but left plenty of blanks and just assumed the AI would “do what I mean”.

So, I took a look for some free themes on HTML5 UP and once I got one I liked, I downloaded it, unzipped it into a new folder and then I told the API to convert it into a WordPress theme.

Over the course of the next 20 odd minutes, I had got the AI to spool up a WordPress docker container so I could easily test, and then with a back and fourth I customised the theme – adding some stuff, removing others, tweaking the style slightly. All without touching a single line of code, in a natural language conversation, identical to the kinds I would have over slack with my developers… but so much faster.

At the same time, I selected a different theme, and vibed a next.js page for a side project. Simple, but the theme was adapted with little effort.

Of course, I was perfectly capable of doing this myself. But not in 20 minutes.

In addition, today I needed to make a bunch of changes to our data output site at work. While I was at it I decided to tweak the style to be in line with the new style guide we’re rolling out for our modern data services tools. I say tweak, it was a complete redesign.

I did this in 30 seconds, simply by taking a screenshot of the site whose style I wanted to match, dropping it into the chat and asking the AI to make the appropriate changes.

Wow.

This is great for me, and the sunny side is that it would allow people a very rapid way of prototyping their ideas, lowering the creative bar for starting new businesses etc… but, for me the kicker was sobering. When I started out as a baby freelancer, converting templates into working WordPress themes was a simple bread and butter form of income. I imagine it’s much the same for others. This role has now been replaced by Antigravity/Cursor/Co Pilot and a subscription to an LLM.

Times, they are a-changing…