Get the Technology Out of My Way

The other day, I was in the admin panel of my website, which was built by a professional back in 2021. This was the third iteration of my mixerman.net site, which cost thousands of dollars to have built, and for good reason. It takes a lot of man hours and expertise to build a website. Expertise I don’t have.

I don’t have sufficient knowledge for maintaining my site either. And I usually just call my admin—the guy who built the site—to have him do it. But it kind of always drives me crazy that any little change requires calling someone else. Why can’t I just do it myself? I’m here. I know what I want. I just want to do it.

Anyway, I’m in the admin panel, and I see that I’ve got a whole slew of plugins that need updating, and I’ve got all sorts of warnings that my site is going to explode if I don’t do some basic maintenance, and rather than to email my admin and hire him to do all the needed updates, I queried my favorite AI for help.

“Claude. Can you help me with my WordPress site? I have a lot of warnings and things that need updating.”

Let me just stop here for a moment to say, I realize there’s lots of people who follow me (and even more that don’t), who absolutely despise AI with every part of their being, and don’t believe it should be used for anything whatsoever. If you fall into that category, I’ve probably already lost you. But if you feel that way and you’re still reading, I would say hear me out. Or, erm…read me out. I’m not specifically selling the virtues of AI here. In fact, I’m making a broader point.

Professionals who make music don’t want an AI to create for us. We want a tool that gets the technology out of our way.

Moving forward.

My site is a WordPress site, and I’ve had two of them built on that platform, and all I can say about it is—it sucks. Hey, it might be great for some people, but when someone builds you a custom WordPress site, you are locked in to certain design aspects. Which is kind of the point of a WordPress site, I think. But it can be very limiting and brings with it a lot of friction for someone like me. I mean, just to put up a basic blog post is a two-hour ordeal. I’ve got SEO tools screaming at me to write in shorter sentences, to repeat certain words repeatedly, to add internal links, external links, images, pixels, slugs… it’s fucking endless and the SEO plugin is never happy anyway. No matter what I do. I’ve pretty much given up trying because it wants me to write in some bullshit way that I really can’t even describe, other than to say badly.

I’ve sold well over 100,000 books. What’s wrong with how I write?

Then there’s formatting the look of the post (and the pages), which is nothing short of torturous and never comes out the way I want it anyway. Suffice to say, the technology is constantly getting in the way. As a result, I really don’t post much, and I rarely change anything on the site, because I have this little personal issue that I can’t seem to shake. When I find a task completely sucks and could aptly be described as painfully tedious and laborious in the most uninteresting of ways? I tend not to do it. Yes, I’m charmed and spoiled and I should rot in hell.

It’s kind of like when you’re trying to make a record, and you’re not especially skilled or knowledgeable at operating your DAW, or any of the other equipment you have, and you just want to pull your fucking hair out because it shouldn’t take half a day to lay down a simple guitar riff that you can play in your sleep. If only you could record it adequately. Why does it all have to be so fucking difficult?

Of course, recording and websites have been like this for my entire life. The technology is insanely technical and unless you have a lot of experience, the technology is always getting in the way. In fact, as a producer, one of my most important functions is to keep the technology from sucking the life out of the process. When I’m successful at that? Everyone enjoys making the track. When I’m not—nobody’s happy. Life is way too short to be unhappy while you’re trying to create something you like.

Back to last week.

So, I’m having Claude help me with the website, and it has me create a backup first. After all, it certainly wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that in the process, I/it would break shit. And I/it did just that. One plugin update at the wrong time literally broke the site.

I wasn’t happy, of course. I even scolded Claude.

“The reason I employ you is literally to prevent this sort of thing from happening,” I wrote.

Claude apologized profusely, insisted I was right, and even admitted that the whole process had been going so smoothly, it got a little over-confident, and didn’t bother to check whether updating that plugin would break the site.

I swear to fucking god, I can’t think of anything much more human than that. It makes me regret using the pronoun “it.” But I digress.

Right. So, after sending an email to my admin (who was on vacation) asking him to REVERT (which I couldn’t do from my lowly station, Claude either), I did a little digging. Come to find out, five years is a long time for a website, and I had really important shit that needed a major update. I’d rather avoid the technical details as it’s really not relevant to the overarching theme of the story. The bottom line is, my website really needed a major overhaul and it was only a matter of time before things stopped working entirely. There was no more putting it off.

Faced with having to spend thousands of dollars again to remain on a website platform I fucking hate with a design I find out of date, I queried Claude again.

“Can’t you just help me build my website?”

Well! Claude was like, “but of course!” and I asked it to set up a plan of action. A few minutes later, I had just that.

The plan: Claude would take all my assets from the current site and rebuild it as a static site first locally on my computer for testing and revisions. The new build would have nothing to do with WordPress, and anything I wanted to do with the site design-wise, Claude could do for me. All I had to do was tell it what I wanted. You know…prompt it.

Once the site was built locally, Claude would set me up on Netlify and GitHub (among other vendors for forms and email signups), and I could have total control. I’d never be locked into a template again. If I wanted to make a change, it was as simple as telling Claude to make it. If I was no longer using Claude, it wouldn’t matter. Another AI could handle it, as could a person. I wasn’t locked in to anything. And the best part? Aside from the domain costs and $100 per month for Claude—both of which I was already paying—it would cost me nothing. And I mean nothing. Not even for the hosting of the site.

Of course, there was my time…

So I said, “yes let’s do it.” Then it asked whether I wanted to make it look the same or go with a new design. I chose the latter. Five years is a long time to stick with a design too. Things change. We move forward.

“Please model the new design on my latest book MIXERMAN’S Ultimate Guide to PRODUCING Records, Music & Songs,” I told Claude.

I spent the next two weeks of my free time working with Claude to revise the site until I was happy with it. Oh, it spit out something decent immediately. And I’m not complaining about the time, because I had a blast doing it. This was no chore. This was a labor of love. I was treating it like it was a piece of art. I painstakingly replaced nearly every asset. I completely designed the look of every element. I generated images with Nano Banana which I’d also bring into Photoshop beta for adjustments and give to Claude to install—a logo that looks like it’s made from a metal plate, gear plates on the bottom for the email list and the footer menu, those old punch-label stickers, board tape, a gear plate for the top menu bar, complete with screws. I made graphical cards for all the books, added drop shadows, changed fonts, changed colors, changed all of the copy…I fucked with this site for far too many hours with Claude faithfully implementing every adjustment for me.

I say “far too many hours,” but for the first time—EVER—working on my website was actually fun. I could finally get what was in my head onto the screen, because I didn’t have the technology getting in my way. And I could spend as much time as I wanted on it, because I didn’t have the pressure of someone else’s time. It was like working on an enormous multi-day puzzle. You know in many ways, it was kind of like making a production. It’s just that making a production is in my wheelhouse, so I’m fast and efficient at it. Making a website? Not so much.

Now, I won’t pretend there was no friction. Our AI tools are far from perfect, and I swear to god, sometimes I think they get tired and lose all ability to function. Which is ridiculous. Absurd even. But that’s what it looks like when the AI does something that only a five-year-old would do, to the point that I literally have to ask if it’s alright. Fortunately a new day (and apparently a new chat window) brings with it a resurgence of abilities. And we carry on.

I’m telling you, the process of working with AI is eerily like working with people sometimes.

There were technical details too, DNS, CNAME…this needs to point to that and that needs to point to this…all in a certain order or you’re screwed. There were accounts to open, email domains to move, and all sorts of other mind-numbingly technical web-related shit I have no earthly idea how to set up. Still don’t. How would I? I gave Claude full access to my logged-in accounts through Chrome and let it set all of that shit up for me.

All of this to say…

I have a new website. And I couldn’t have done it without AI, and I wouldn’t have done it without AI, because frankly, it wouldn’t have been any fun.

Let me just say I completely understand the backlash to AI. I certainly understand why people are fed up with data centers and don’t want them close by. I don’t either. I definitely get why someone would want to make a record in a way that they find enjoyable using technologies from decades ago. How could I not? I made records that way for half my career.

The crazy thing is, as much as I think AI is a fascinating tool, I don’t use AI for making music. Not yet anyway. I’m not opposed to it. In fact I’m developing tools that employ AI myself. But where it comes to mixing music? I have processes on top of processes that make mixing fast and efficient, and I’d be hard pressed to leave a working environment that I know like the back of my hand to something shiny and new. That’s not going to happen until someone makes a system I can switch to with almost no learning curve and minimal friction.

This is the thing that technology companies aren’t quite grasping about AI—especially audio technology companies. Professionals who make music don’t want an AI to create for us. That’s for the curious who seek entertainment, however short-lived it may be. We want a tool that gets the technology out of our way. I mean completely out of our way, so that we can create without impediments. Amateurs want that too. And getting technology out of our way is frankly what AI is great at. Or at least it can be, when implemented properly.

But until AI can significantly shorten the distance from point A to point B in a way that is instantly more efficient and enjoyable, there’s no reason to bring it into my flow. I know exactly what that looks like too. You only have to ask.

All of that notwithstanding, I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you’re going to create something, whether that’s your music, art, a book, a photograph, even a post, then the process needs to be fun. Otherwise, what’s the fucking point?

If you find that a particular technology is fun to use, and if that technology helps you to create things that you like or to make things you’d never been able to make before, and in a satisfying way? Why that my friends, is a technology worth using.

Let me know what you think of my website!

Enjoy,

Mixerman