How AI Gave My Old Website a Second Life

Hello,

This is Simon with the latest edition of The Weekly. In these updates, I share key AI related stories from this week's news, list upcoming events, and share any longer form articles posted on the website.

I've been pretty busy over the last few weeks rebuilding an old website that I built by hand back in 2017, when I taught myself to code with Ruby on Rails. Whilst I had the site up and running, competing priorities meant it slipped to the side, and over time it became quite outdated; so outdated that I couldn't make any changes without everything breaking. I realised I had a pretty big task to get back on track, and in all honesty, it was beyond me. I wrote in a previous post about how I started using Google Gemini to help create a new version from scratch, and whilst I got quite far fairly quickly, it still wasn't smooth. There was a lot of copying and pasting between Gemini and my coding app (VS Code) with lots of errors to still work out, and the elephant in the room was that I'd be ditching my old site, which had taken me so long to build.

Fast forward to February 2026, and the picture has changed dramatically. I recently installed Claude Code, which has allowed me to work directly on the original files going back to 2017. Within a few hours, it had completely updated the site so that it was fully working again and I could make changes on the live version. With the project back to a healthy state, I've also been able to make many further improvements. In that older post, you'll see that I had an idea to build a recommendation engine so that users could discover new coffee. What felt like a mountain of a challenge at the time was solved by Claude Code in about ten minutes.

It genuinely feels a little like magic. I think of something I'd like to do to the site, write my prompt, and Claude Code writes out all the required code and logic. I can review the changes and then push them to the live website. It's almost like an interpreter, taking my ideas and translating them into working code.

Whilst my approach is somewhat technical — installing CLI tools via the terminal, integrating with GitHub, and setting up servers — the capabilities it has unlocked are genuinely impressive.

Do I think these new AI coding tools will replace web developers? Not at all. What they do, however, is supercharge their abilities: accelerating development, squashing bugs rapidly, and surfacing solutions that might not have been considered otherwise. If you're at all inclined to build something, I'd strongly recommend checking out Claude Code to see what it can do. If you want a starting point, a classic first project is asking it to build you a personal to-do app.

If you do create something, I'd love to hear about it, feel free to drop me an email.

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In this section, I’m going to bring to you a real world example of AI use.

Anthropic launched a batch of enterprise-focused integrations aimed at embedding Claude into everyday tools (think email, calendars, docs, workflow apps) and specific functions like HR, finance, and legal.

Why it matters: This is the clearest signal that “AI at work” is shifting from chatbots to embedded assistants inside the apps people already use

Multiple market previews framed Nvidia’s results as a major test of whether AI infrastructure spend is still justified. A lot of investors are concerned about the huge amounts that are being spent.

Why it matters: Even for non-investors, Nvidia is a proxy for the whole ecosystem: if spend slows, it can ripple into tool budgets, vendor roadmaps, and AI project timelines.

OpenAI launched Frontier, positioned as a way for companies to build/manage AI agents, while OpenAI leadership also noted enterprise AI still hasn’t penetrated business processes at scale.

Why it matters: It’s a useful framing for leaders: the next phase is process change, not prompts

Thanks for reading, and see you next Thursday.

Simon,

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