Hello there! 👋 Welcome to our new website, v2.

v0

When I started building the majlovesreg.one website back in 2018, it was a gift for my soon-to-be-wife. It started from scratch using a text editor to manually type HTML + CSS + JS files (tip: click the heart emoji ❤️ there↗).

v1

Soon enough I realized I needed a CMS. Back then, WordPress (WP) was the go-to for self-hosted websites, and version 1 was built on it. The backend was NGINX with its now-old-school optimizations. I enjoyed those times playing around with WP. Yet as we added posts and features, it was clear how much maintenance work WP needed, especially with the flood of security vulnerabilities and breaches. It always felt like whack-a-mole when it came to securing the website.

After around two years maintaining v1, I stumbled on a modern website architecture: Jamstack. It was new, neat, secure, and still didn’t look too good. 😅 But I knew it was the future. I checked it out and played with Hugo and Gatsby. But very quickly, I realized one thing: the days of a solo website developer (at least with the free time I have) are gone. To set up these sites, you’ll need a team (or dedicate your whole time) to build the website if you’d like it to work and look good.

So for the next five years, it has always just been a desire. Looking, learning, playing while knowing I’d never have the time to implement it. Until…

vibe

These past few months I’ve been hearing from friends about vibe coding. I’ve tried GitHub Copilot since 2021 but have been mostly unimpressed. The early days of ChatGPT and Gemini can make code that sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t, but always seems to be inefficient. Although I also believed that ML and LLM can improve exponentially. So as I was hearing more about the new “vibe”, I felt I’d like to give it another try.

I started with my long-installed-never-used Antigravity IDE in my laptop. So I typed away and asked it to create a Jamstack website using the Astro framework that will be uploaded to GitHub and deployed by Cloudflare Pages. And… 🤯 It did not only create code that works, it scaffolded and executed a whole tech stack! I was elated.

What took me five years to imagine, vibe coding leisurely accomplished in two days. With an AI assistant, solo web development is possible again. 😊

It took only two days for me to prompt Antigravity in between cooking, ministry, sign language presentation prepping, and watching YouTube videos. Not only did it make the new site, it made importing the old site a breeze. It easily converted old HTMLs into Markdown source files. I felt less like a programmer and more like a project manager, guiding my capable AI assistant on what needs to be done. I can do it solo again.

Soon enough, I hit my free token limits. I continued to polish the site using another vibe coding app: Codex. And a few more vibe coding tools each time I hit the limits of free usage. (I love free. This website, from v0 to v1 to v2, has always run through free services. I only ever paid for the domain name. 😁)

v2

So now, at about our 7th wedding anniversary, Regine and I are happy to present to you version 2 of our website. It’s Jamstack, runs on Astro, and source materials are in Markdown—good format for future-proofing.

If you miss the original wedding website, don’t worry, we time capsuled it to preserve that most special chapter. It is archived here: one.majlovesreg.one.

promptgrammer

I was so happy with what was achieved with vibe coding that I shared it with a programmer friend. This is what he said:

At our work now, it’s no longer about being good at coding, it’s about being good at making prompts so the AI can code.

Hearing that, my brain quickly coined a new term: promptgrammer. (Only to learn later that many others thought of the same term ahead of me. 😅)

End note: Oh by the way, I asked ChatGPT to write this article by reading my published articles and write in my style. It was bad. Really bad AI slop that you’ll recognize immediately. But that’s how I felt about vibe coding years back. So who’s to tell how (and how fast) AI will improve in writing according to a person’s style? I’ll eagerly wait. (And the hero image of this post? Yes, AI generated. 😎)

💻