I Rebuilt My Site Twice. Here's What the Second Time Taught Me.

I rebuilt my personal site. Then I rebuilt it again. The first time I thought the problem was the old site. The second time I realized the problem was how I was working. Two versions, same problem The original site was built in Astro. I chose Astro because I wanted to experiment with something new. I'd been doing mostly backend and infrastructure work at the time, and my frontend skills were, let's say, still developing. The result was functional and completely forgettable: white text on a black background, no real personality, nothing that said anything about who I was or what I did. So I decided to rebuild it using AI. I had access to Cursor through work, so I started there. The workflow was straightforward: describe what you want, get a plan, let it generate most of the site at once. It was better. Some things were genuinely nice: red underlines styled like brushstrokes, a layout that felt more composed. But it was also a mess. Too many color variations that didn't quite agree with