This is Technology Bytes, episode 177, for July 26th, 2026.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
As you know, I avoided artificial intelligence for a very long time.
It just didn’t seem like it held a place for me and the things that I do in my life.
And then a couple things changed.
At work, they tied Claude into all of the data that we collect at work for the things that we accomplish in our business.
And then they gave me access to it and the ability to develop dashboards for my managers to be able to see what the day looks like and what the next day might look like.
And so that’s been kind of cool, and it’s been pretty eye-opening.
And then I thought, I have a website that I haven’t touched for…
It ends up being eight years.
And so I thought, I wonder what AI does for web development.
Today, that was the task.
I wanted to play around with web development using AI and see what it could do for building my website.
Now, I don’t have a website that I need a lot of work on.
It really…
I don’t even know anyone that goes to it anymore.
It really doesn’t have anything.
I’m thinking maybe I need to spend a little time not trying to build a business, not trying to do anything, but I do record two podcasts and maybe a blog now and then.
I’m just trying to figure it out.
But I thought, I wonder if AI would help me do that web development more simply and get something that looks fairly good and might be easy to manage and those kinds of things.
So I paid for what’s called WordPress Grow that has some AI capability.
Now, maybe I’m not using the best one, and so maybe my ideas of how this works might be a little bit tainted as I go through this microcast, but it has not been simple.
In fact, in the process, I ruined my original website with links to these podcasts and my other to this podcast and my other podcast.
And so there’s nothing on my website that hasn’t been generated by junk.
And so none of it means anything.
None of the links mean anything.
None of the text means anything.
It was all developed by AI, and it actually does look fairly nice, but it’s got things like, you know, Emily Merrig is the person who’s in charge of the website.
And I don’t even know if that person exists.
And then they put pictures of the team members and they have pictures of men with women’s names and pictures of women with men’s names.
And so all in all, it hasn’t been very simple at all.
And so then as I was trying to figure out, okay, so I’m just on the homepage, how do I edit that with AI?
And I think I still need to do some work.
It took me a minute to get it all linked up.
And now I’ve got to go back and put some of the things from my other website in and see how that works.
But to start out with, it hasn’t been the same experience I’ve had with AI use in other areas of my life.
I’ve been using Siri AI from Apple now for a few weeks because I’m on the beta, and it’s been pretty impressive.
There’s a few things that it can’t do, and I understand that.
It’s brand new.
There’s still things going to be built into it.
But I’ve been very impressed with it and the ability to use it for doing lots of different things and also its knowledge of what’s on my phone and in my iCloud account and all of those things.
And so my current use of AI has been eye-opening.
In fact, it’s been kind of, I don’t know, maybe it’s been fun.
But wow, coming to web development with AI has not been yet that much fun.
So maybe I need to do a little learning.
I don’t have any coding ability.
My original website that I made is a WordPress site that I really used click and drag and drop.
And maybe that’s artificial intelligence.
I don’t know.
Typing this in, putting a link into this, doing, you know, but it was always kind of laid out on the page for me, and I never asked anybody what to do.
I never talked to anybody about how to do it.
It probably didn’t look all that nice, but that’s what I had available.
And, you know, maybe if I was using another site, not WordPress, maybe if I was using something else, maybe that would be better.
I may do a little research in the best AI for web development, and maybe there’s something else I should do differently.
And maybe it will give me a better feel for that.
And my experience with that work might mimic or at least mirror, near mirror is the wrong thing, I guess mimic what I’ve used AI for in other tasks, and it might kind of knock my socks off.
So maybe I need to go another direction.
Maybe I need to do a little more research.
This microcast was probably a bit premature without doing some of that, but this is my initial thoughts.
This is the initial way that I tried to tackle it, and it has not been super, but, you know, it did produce something, just not anything that I find very useful, and the editing of that has been, yeah, I don’t know.
I’ve got work to do.
Anyway, not a very good day, late recording my podcast, didn’t learn all that much, and it’s just been frustrating.
So we’ll see what happens.
This topic will be covered again probably next week because I want to play around with it a little more, and hopefully it will improve.
Well, that is all I have for today.
If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, you can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together, taking another bite of technology.
