I've been writing in English on this blog since 2018—though not very often. Lately, since I have some free time to test AI tools and explore their capabilities—currently between jobs and looking for full-time work—I decided to act on something that's been on my mind for a while: revamp my blog's theme and add Turkish language support.

Previously, I hosted my blog on GitHub Pages using Hexo. However, since I'm not particularly proficient in JavaScript and found managing themes and plugins a bit cumbersome, I ended up building what you see here entirely with Kotlin, FreeMarker, and Flexmark.

After experimenting with a few tools, using Trae AI together with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, I was able to build a functional static blog just by prompting and giving instructions. In about two days, it turned into a finished product. I achieved exactly what I wanted with very little actual coding on my part. That said, I don't think it's possible yet to get this kind of successful result without knowing any code at all. At times, I had to refer to specific HTML class names, or point directly to bugs in the code and tell it how to fix them. You still need coding knowledge, and articulating that clearly so a computer or AI can understand is a challenge in itself. There were plenty of hiccups where my prompts weren't clear enough, or the AI misunderstood, went off on its own tangent, messed up files, or ran operations in the wrong directories.

In the end, though I can't say how often I'll post, I now have a ready-to-use blog to start writing again.

As a result of this process, the blog now lets you listen to posts using listen2it, leave comments via Utterances.io, run Kotlin snippets with Kotlin Playground, and write posts in Markdown powered by Flexmark—all put together with Trae AI.

See you in the next posts!