AI and Ambition

There’s a lot of talk about AI driving operational efficiency, doing the same job with smaller team, but not enough talk about how AI can make us more ambitious as web builders.

Last weekend I made a few playful tweaks to the design of this blog, that I would not remotely have had time for before the age of AI.

Get Animated

At an impulse, while I was reading an article in my bed, I prompted an Agent Runner:

Make the width of the little red dash under each blog title based on the estimated reading length of the article.

Claude Code went to work and easily implemented this in one shot. Then I got a bit inspired and asked it to add a subtle animation:

now add a cool little animation on scroll, when starting to scroll down, gently move and rotate the dash from horizontal to vertical and to the left of the article text, and then make it get shorter and shorter as you scroll through the article so it finally disappears when you're done reading.

It took a few prompts from my phone before it got to a good place, but now I’m enjoying this little easter egg of a reading indicator, and it was doable in between things, on a whim.

Before AI, this would have taken a ton of noodling around. It’s not as such a difficult coding task, but it would have taken more effort than it was possibly worth. With AI, I could push this out in a spur of the moment.

Print Design on the Web

A few days later, I got inspired to try another experiment I’ve been thinking about for a while.

What if I could use Claude Code as my personal art director and front-page editor?

Back in the hey-day of printed magazines, each edition would have a fully custom designed front-page, fully based on the content, articles and themes of the issue.

When we moved to the blog, and especially when we entered the age of responsive design, these custom layouts and explorations got replaced with far more rigid design systems, tied to lists of content from a CMS.

What if I could use AI to treat my blog like a print magazine and fully redo the front-page every time there’s a new article?

I opened up my phone and dictated a quick prompt to an Agent Runner:

I want to rethink the index page to be far more varied and creative.

I want to use it like the front page of a print magazine or newspaper. Instead of a generic ordered list of posts, each "edition" should be designed around the latest blog post and the whole page designed around that, with custom generated front page artwork.

Create a Claude skill that let's you design a new frontpage. The flow will be that when I add a new post and want to publish it, we design a new frontpage for the new edition. It should have different designs for mobile and desktop.

Desktop should be crafted around a bold "above the fold" experience based on the theme and messaging of the newest post, potentially featuring the most closely related content. The rest of the posts should be below the fold. Think of it as the frontpage of a new print edition of wired magazine in its heyday.

The mobile edition should similarly have a focused and strong visually appealing top of the fold but with content and design tailored to the smaller format.

When creating the frontpage read through all content of the whole blog, summarize, quote and paraphrase as needed. And create a stunning, unique frontpage for each edition.

It took a few follow up prompts, but then I started getting something that at least felt pretty fun and unexpected. And now as I type this post into an Agent Runner (I’ve really made Agent Runners my CMS), I’m excited to see what my front-page editor and creative director comes up with for the new edition. You can also visit the archive of old editions to browse the history of front-pages.

AI Ambition

These are small playful examples, of experiments on my blog. But they tell us something more about how we can start getting more playful, how we can find room for tasks that would never fit a roadmap or a busy schedule, how agents can push, not our efficiency, but our ambition and our urge to do more, push ideas further, elevate the stuff we build on the web.

Claude might not be the strongest creative director out there, but the fact that I can have one for a small personal blog feels pretty amazing, and I’m encouraged to keep playing and experimenting in a way that I would never be able to find time for before my eager agents showed up.

Transplant that to the companies we build and run, and the work we do day to day at Netlify, and the lesson is that we can stretch further, experiment more, build deeper, fix the pain points that we otherwise wouldn’t have time for — rather than just build the same roadmap a bit faster.