What happened was this: I asked Cursor to look at my website code and suggest some changes, things that I could improve. Of course this was not the first time that I had asked it that. I had asked Cursor the same question some time back as well, and it had given me a different set of things to do.

This time it gave me another set of things to do. The first of which was to ensure that I use reusable components throughout my website.

One major reason why I moved from Ghost to self-hosting and building my website with Astro was that I wanted to control how it looked, how it worked, how it functioned, the types of posts that I had, and how those posts would be displayed on a page on my website. All through the past few weeks and months, I’ve been working on that. Not me really, it has been Cursor. I’ve been asking it to do things a certain way. I’ve had many inspirations from Craig Mod to more recently, Maggie Appleton. Also, I have been inspired by and taken some elements from Interconnected. Did I say Craig Mod already?

The point being that I directed Cursor to build me my website in the way I want to look and how I want things to function in terms of architecture and everything else. I have not been writing the code.

This is something that I have started and abandoned many times in the past. This thing where I want to learn Front-End. I’ve used Free Code Camp, I have used MDN, I have used many of those things in the past but I just can’t seem to stick through it. And there are many reasons for it, of course. If I were a developer, I would’ve stuck through it and created it out. But the main reason why I wanted to learn was always because I wanted to control how my website looked.

With Cursor and Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, I finally had the tools which would let me tell a computer how I wanted my website to look like, and it would make it happen.

Getting back to it, what happened was I asked Cursor to create reusable components for me, and it did. But then it broke how my Nordletter component looked, which led me to Maggie Appleton’s website and then to her GitHub and the code source code for all of her website. I looked at it and asked myself why I could not build it. Why was I not writing the code?

Because while Cursor was writing the code and creating things and making them look how they should, I always had this feeling at the back of my head that maybe it wasn’t doing the best thing possible. That maybe it was not doing responsive design properly. I had to give it very detailed instructions on how I wanted something to be, and if I were not that detailed, it might not do the thing that I wanted to do.

And in the end, it’s my website, right? It’s my website. It’s my home on the web. I am responsible for the time. I’m responsible for the code that is there, and then somehow after two months of asking Cursor to build my website, I was suddenly not fine with it. I was suddenly not fine with not knowing how my code worked.

Is that weird? I think it’s a little weird, and maybe I am overthinking things too much. What I have decided to do for now is to create a new empty project, a new empty Astro init, and then get to where I am right now with my website. From there, I’ll go on hopefully knowing all the components, layouts, and code that go into my website.

And that will make me happy.