Hands Upon a New Tool

New tools can make creative work dramatically faster, but speed changes the process as much as the outcome. Rebuilding my portfolio with Framer and AI saved weeks of work, while also making me wonder what gets lost when there is less room for mistakes, wandering and accidental discovery. Maybe the real skill is knowing when speed helps and when the long way is part of the craft.

New tools can make creative work dramatically faster, but speed changes the process as much as the outcome. Rebuilding my portfolio with Framer and AI saved weeks of work, while also making me wonder what gets lost when there is less room for mistakes, wandering and accidental discovery. Maybe the real skill is knowing when speed helps and when the long way is part of the craft.

I have a general rule with new technology: learn enough about it first, then decide whether I like it or not.

A lot of the hate around new technology seems to come from simply not knowing what it does. Which is understandable. It is much easier to dismiss something unfamiliar than spend a weekend figuring out how the damn thing works.

So I spent some time rebuilding this website.

I doubt many people are hand-coding portfolio sites from scratch these days. Between no-code tools, templates and AI, the whole process has become ridiculously accessible.

That said, I still think it is worth knowing the building blocks underneath. HTML, CSS, how things fit together, what the browser is actually doing. Just in case Skynet eventually makes everything proprietary and starts charging us per div. Oh wait.

For this one, I used Framer, which I had wanted to properly learn for a while. I also experimented with an AI agent to build some of the scaffolding while I concentrated on the actual meat of the thing: the structure, writing, projects, visuals and all the tiny decisions that eventually make something feel like mine.

The whole thing took roughly two days.

Hand-coding something similar would probably have taken me weeks.

That is pretty cool.

There is a strange downside to all that convenience, though. When everything becomes faster, some of the wandering disappears. The stupid mistakes. The accidental discoveries. The hours spent trying something that ultimately goes nowhere.

Maybe a little bit of the soul disappears with it.

Or maybe the real skill now is knowing where speed helps and where taking the long way is actually part of the work.

Either way, I learned a new tool and finally gave my portfolio the rebuild it badly needed.

Still tinkering with it, obviously.

*Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

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