Journey of My Portfolio: Agentic Era
Journey of My Portfolio: Agentic Era
No more scaffolding projects by hand. No more staring at a blank create-next-app output wondering where to start. No more spending a weekend just wiring up a design system before writing a single line of actual content.
This time, I wasn’t the only one building my portfolio.
Riding the Hype Wave
Like most people in tech, I didn’t jump straight into “agentic coding.” I eased into it, riding the hype in stages.
- First it was the OpenAI API, poking at it, building tiny things
- Then ChatGPT, using it as a smarter Stack Overflow
- Then Claude, which slowly became my default for actually thinking through problems, not just answering them
- Then Claude Code, and that’s when things stopped feeling like “using AI” and started feeling like “working with AI”
Each stage felt like the ceiling of what was possible kept moving. Just when I thought I understood what these tools could do, the next one reset the bar completely.
From Typing Code to Directing It
Every previous era of this portfolio was defined by a framework. Angular’s structure, Gatsby’s GraphQL, Next.js’s flexibility.
This era is different. It’s not defined by what I built with. It’s defined by how I built.
For the first time, I wasn’t the one writing every line. I was describing what I wanted, reviewing what came back, correcting course, and iterating, more like directing than typing.
That shift took some getting used to. Years of muscle memory built around typing every character myself, and suddenly the most valuable skill wasn’t typing speed. It was being able to explain, clearly, what you actually wanted.
Building brionmario.com, Again
This time, the rebuild happened almost entirely with Claude Code doing the heavy lifting.
I simply described what I wanted, reviewed what came back, and shipped it over night. Faster than any previous rewrite by a wide margin.
And I’ll be honest about it: it shows. If you look closely, it has that unmistakable AI slop look, the kind of generic gradient-and-rounded-corner aesthetic you start recognizing everywhere once you know what to look for. Speed came at the cost of a lot of the intentionality that used to go into design decisions.
Looking Back
Blogspot taught me curiosity. WordPress taught me systems and hosting. The framework era taught me structure, and the cost of chasing every shiny new thing.
This era is teaching me something different. Building software is slowly becoming less about memorizing syntax and more about clarity of thought, being able to describe a problem well enough that something else can help you solve it.
Turns out, though, this journey never actually ends. I’m currently redesigning the site again, this time with Claude Design, trying to fix exactly the thing I just admitted to, the AI slop look. Same tools, same speed, but this time actually paying attention to the design instead of just shipping the first thing that worked.
Grab the latest source: https://github.com/brionmario/brionmario.com
Signing off… ✌️❤️
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Sep 1