I haven’t posted on this blog in ages. All my good intentions went out the window as other activities filled me up with business.
After listening to an episode of the Hard Fork podcast a few weeks ago, I decided to let an AI Agent rejig my blog for the craic. This is a simple WordPress-powered site, so it didn’t seem like there’d be much at stake. All my “content” (handful of posts) is backed up, so what was the harm? My aim was to make a nicer looking version of the site, one that might encourage me to post more often. I hade three goals:
- Make the site look nicer
- Rejig the Goodreads widget I already had so it displayed more evenly (it could cause horizontal scrolling sometimes)
- Build a “last song played widget”, pulling info from my Apple Music feed.
- Reorganise my old posts
It was a disaster.
I used the Comet browser, logged in with a Pro account of Perplexity and also logged into my WordPress admin console. It started OK, but quickly went off the rails. The Agent changed the theme and added a couple of placeholder pages, which looked promising, but then it made an absolute shitshow out of the menus. Suddenly, the layout of the blog was all over the place. It added random headings to pages, deleted images, added other unwanted images – all in all a complete waste of time. The existing Goodreads widget was overwritten by placeholder text and the Apple Music thing had no chance of working.
In hindsight, the prompts I supplied may not have been the most helpful, though the AI agent told me (confidently) that it knew exactly what I wanted. LIES!
What did I learn?
- AI agents can act on your behalf, but they aren’t actually that smart. The results vary wildly.
- Despite WordPress being the most popular CMS in the world, a simple menu flummoxed the AI
- An experiment with the intention of saving me time, actually cost me time
All in all, it was an interesting test case. I know that AI can code up a static site, or simple web apps – but it failed miserably at redesigning my blog. I’ve reset the site to use the stock twentysixteen template with a view to fixing it later on down the road. Many of my old posts now have tags on them that I don’t need.
I’m not saying that AI agents are useless – just that this exercise was. If you want something done properly, do it yourself.