So, I Redesigned My Blog

_{Content translated by ChatGPT.}

Maybe entry-level development jobs were already doomed long ago.

Yesterday, I made seven mockups for a new blog design in Canva. Then a thought suddenly struck me: what would happen if I just threw the mockups and an architecture document at Codex?

The answer: GPT6.1-sol took 17 minutes to finish what used to take me a week of late nights.

In the time it took me to eat a meal, it had built an alarmingly polished website all by itself. Every requirement worked, and it had even handled responsive layouts across devices on its own. Weirdly enough, its animations also ran much more smoothly than those on my old blog. With a few small tweaks, the first version of the site took only about two hours from start to finish.

I feel like I’m the bottleneck in its productivity. It’s like a computer from the punched-tape era: the CPU spends very little time actually running, while most of the time is wasted on manual I/O.

Why I Wanted to Rebuild My Blog

Thanks to my old habit of charging straight into writing code, my previous blog might not have been pretty, but at least it was ugly. The philosophy of “as long as it runs” permeated the entire project, leaving the code so tangled and messy that changing one thing could mean editing three or four files. Recently, I wanted to add a whole new series to the blog. But after looking at the old code structure, I realized that adding it would require refactoring almost half the project. At that point, I might as well build a new website from scratch.

Still, the main reason was that it looked bad. (

The blog’s theme comes from a light novel I read last month called Ben-To. It’s a ridiculous yet hot-blooded story about a bunch of people battling over half-price bento. The “HP Half Price Club” in the story is a club formed by half-price bento enthusiasts. It reminded me of my freshman and sophomore years, when we were preparing for competitions in our student club, sitting beside the machines and eating dinner together amid all the chatter. Such warm memories. I really envy them for having a place where they feel they belong.

So I began collecting elements I wanted to use as decorations on the blog. The first step in design is brainstorming.

^{Some bits and pieces of styles I liked}

I wanted my website to have a bit of that old-internet feel, with some convenience-store elements mixed in to make it feel a little more welcoming. I like Lawson. Imagine being hungry at four in the morning, with no restaurants open. How wonderful would it be to have a Lawson right downstairs?

Open 24 hours a day, Lawson will always be there waiting for you, with its oden and onigiri.

And so this design came about.

My whole idea for the website started with these three blocks of blue, red, and blue. Put them together like this, and that everyday convenience-store feeling immediately comes through. The site’s favicon captures the vibe even better.

^{Looks like a convenience store that might randomly spawn downstairs from your apartment}

The inspiration for this favicon actually came from Professor GPT. After finishing the site’s framework, it casually whipped up a favicon too. (My goodness, Professor G really does think of everything.) It was basically those three colored blocks underneath some English initials. But since the colors and design were generated entirely by AI, there was something indescribably uncanny about it at first glance, so I deleted it right away.

The New “Series” Section

It all started last week, when I got so hungry at four in the morning that I ran over to a Lawson beside the 24-hour library to look for a bento. I’m well aware of my spectacularly bad luck: if I picked one at random, I was absolutely certain I’d end up with the worst-tasting option. So I opened Xiaohongshu and searched for “Lawson bento recommendations.” There were barely any relevant results, and the bentos in the few posts that actually reviewed them weren’t even sold where I live.

Is going to Lawson for bento in the middle of the night really that niche?

If no one else is doing it, I’ll do it myself! …Or something like that. Fired up by this sudden burst of enthusiasm, I designed the Series page, where I’ll occasionally write about things I’ve seen and eaten. I hope someone out there enjoys it.

These entries are meant to be much shorter than regular blog articles—more like little posts, really—but they’ll also be updated more frequently. I gave them their own RSS feed, so you can decide for yourself whether to subscribe to a series that might send you notifications every single day.

I might add a few other little series later on, too. Stay tuned!