Every developer writes a “Hello World” as their first line of code. I figured it was only fitting to start this blog the same way — except I didn’t write a single line of code to get here.
I’ve spent over 10 years in IT. Firewalls, servers, Active Directory, event networking for Centre Bell — that’s my world. Web development? Never touched it. HTML, CSS, JavaScript frameworks — I knew they existed the same way I know planes exist: I’ve seen them, I couldn’t build one.
Then I started thinking about AI differently.
Not as a chatbot. Not as something that writes emails for you. But as a genuine collaborator — something you could sit down with and actually build things. I wanted to test that idea, and I needed a project.
So I gave myself a challenge: build a personal website from scratch, in one evening, with zero web experience.
I opened Claude Cowork, described what I wanted — an Astro site, bilingual, dark and light mode, hosted on Cloudflare — and just started working. When I didn’t understand something, I asked. When something broke, we debugged it together. I never had to learn what a CSS variable was to use one. I never had to understand Cloudflare Workers routing to get my domain pointing to the right place.
By the end of the evening, simonplourde.com was live.
That’s what this blog is about. Not web development specifically — but using AI to build things I couldn’t have built before. Experimenting, figuring things out, and writing about it along the way. If you’re an IT person curious about where AI is taking things, or just someone who wants to build stuff without spending months learning the surrounding theory first, you might find something useful here.
If you want to know how the site actually got built, the next post gets into it.