The AI Article

2026-04-01T00:00:00Z

There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled over generative AI and its impacts in our current moment. It is (at least for now) the biggest thing being pushed into all areas of our lives. AI-generated ads fill up our social media. Thousands of videos are being generated every day, sometimes for amusing jokes or skits, other times as weapons of disinformation and propaganda. Companies in all industries are looking to GenAI to cut costs (which mostly means laying off humans). It simultaneously feels like an inevitability and an artificially induced push meant to legitimize and justify the technology.

As a student and a software developer, I have seen GenAI evolve in over the years with great interest. For the past two years, students in every class I have taken have been using it, either permissibly or not to, do complete assignments, cheat on exams, and pretty much anything else you could imagine. I have also been privileged enough to learn about the internals of large-language models in the computer science electives offered by my university. Policies at UTK have changed significantly, with many of the initial restrictions on AI usage relaxing as time has progressed. At work, the push towards GenAI has been more in the industry as a whole rather than in the office. It’s becoming more and more apparent that software engineers who push it off are delaying the seemingly inevitable.

My thoughts on GenAI have been changing a lot recently, which is why I wanted to write them down. For the longest time, I’ve tried to push it off and regarded it (and the people who use it) with a lot of scorn and cynicism. And much of that still holds. I worry about the carbon footprint of these models, how much data is being pushed into a seeming endless number of black holes that suck away all our money, attention, and GPUs. But much my initial feelings were based out of fear. I felt (and sometimes still feel) inadequate as a developer. Every accomplishment I got at work didn’t matter if I couldn’t get the next one. And here I was seeing post after post of people accomplishing things I could only dream of doing, developing applications so complex and cool that I felt I could never touch.

But the more time has passed, the less I view GenAI as a threat than as a tool. There are certain things I will confidently stand for and say GenAI can never replace humans in. Artwork, Film, Movies, Great Writing. All these things require a certain something that GenAI can’t have because it doesn’t work like we do. Someone still has to push the buttons, move the equipment, do the work that AI can’t. And I know some will point to robotics as a avenue to do these things in, but the cost-benefit of robots replacing humans is still way off. It takes way to much time, materials, and money, to produce a machine that: (i) Shorts out if it gets wet. (ii) Relies on a preprogrammed system of commands and systems to interface with our physical world. (iii) Consists of a bunch of subsystems either designed for one specific purpose, or meant to emulate human systems already.

Something that AI can’t do without expensive computation and time is abstract away. We are such good organisms because we can handle the almost infinite complexity of the world around us. I don’t worry about the individual threads of the couch I am sitting on, or the millions of transistors in this computer. They still exist and matter, but humans are able to work with the pieces we see and organize at such a fundamental level to understand a system as complex as our world.

Building This Site

2026-04-14T00:00:00Z

I’ve thought about building a portfolio website for a long time. It’s been something that I’ve started a few times but every time I get more than 10% of the way through, something else comes up or I lose interest for long enough that picking it up seems like a big time sink. I’ve tried it out in different forms over the past 7 or 8 years. At first it was as a static Jekyll blog based on a few templates, back when I was in high school and didn’t know hardly anything about…well…anything. Then it became a Next.js app, until I realized that it wasn’t worth the cost or complexity that a React app brings (since it’s nothing but a static site). Now, I’ve been able to get farther than I have before using Eleventy.

At the time of writing this post, I just found out that Eleventy is now re-branding(?) to Build Awesome, as part of the Font Awesome family. We’ll see if it comes with any of the common crappy changes that come with most rebrands like this. In this post, I’ll keep referring to it as Eleventy.

Choosing Eleventy

I chose Eleventy based on some cursory research. I had never used it before and trying out new frameworks is always an interesting endeavor. Its performance metrics seemed impressive, but the only thing that mattered to me was how fast is loads. I don’t have thousands of Markdown files to compile and build time for this website is not that important. The process of optimizing a page load time down further and further is a very cool problem and one I will be trying to figure out for this website.

The Design

I wanted this website to be a bit different than other websites I had worked on before. Prior to this, my work has focused on clean and minimalist designs with symmetry and unity being key traits. My goal for this website was for it to be not just a resume, but a demonstration of my abilities as a software engineer. I have seen many portfolio sites that follow the same aesthetic, doubly so with AI-generated code, so I wanted to challenge myself with a theme that I have never attempted before.

I chose Bauhaus as the core theme of this website. I’ve always loved its blocky, stark aesthetic paired with asymmetry, but have never thought to develop a website styled after it. This website tries to stay as true as possible to this aesthetic, with much of my effort put into the homepage.

What I Learned

Executing a Bauhaus-style website was fairly difficult, especially with minimal JavaScript and little-to-no external libraries. Not so much the actual coding part, but the design iterations were the most difficult. I spent much of my time going back and forth trying to get the best feedback possible on my designs and adjusting what didn’t work. Initally the website’s Bauhaus aesthetic was very surface-level: a few shapes mashed together and placed neatly in the corner away from the neatly organized text. It took multiple iterations to get it to be more asymmetric, a challenge considering the structured nature of web design, with its grids and hierarchy.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with how this website turned out. It’s been a great challenge to have outside of work and school that has taught me a bunch about applying different aesthetic styles and using Eleventy (or whatever it ends up being called) to make a performant and informative website.

Blog

The AI Article

Building This Site

Choosing Eleventy

The Design

What I Learned