Slopmaxing my website

I have been building this website mostly by talking to Hermes from my phone.

That sounds like the worst possible way to make a personal site, and sometimes it is. Voice is imprecise. Small design opinions get compressed into vague requests. A phrase like “make it feel less like a dashboard” can mean ten different things.

But it also changes the shape of the work in a useful way. Instead of opening an editor for every tiny change, I can notice something while walking, say what feels wrong, and let the agent make a pass. Then I look at a screenshot, react to it, and keep going.

The important part is not that the first draft is good. It usually is not. The useful loop is taste, screenshot, correction. I can say that a page feels too card-heavy, that a row looks too rounded, that the spacing is drifting from another page, or that a number should be in pounds instead of kilograms. Hermes can turn that into code, run the site locally, check the route, and show me the result.

I think of this as slopmaxing in the literal sense: producing a lot of low-friction attempts, then aggressively deleting or tightening the parts that feel fake. The first pass often adds too much. The second pass removes the obvious excess. The third pass gets closer to something I would actually want to publish.

That workflow has been especially helpful for the powerlifting section. The data is real and boring in the best way: sets, reps, weights, estimated maxes, volume, totals. The design work is mostly deciding how little interface it needs. A normal dashboard treatment makes it feel worse. A quieter page with useful graphs and simple workout details feels more like my site.

Voice also makes the site feel less finished, which I like. I am more willing to change a page when the cost of starting is a text or a voice memo. The result is still a static personal website, but the maintenance loop feels closer to conversation than a backlog.

That is the part I want to keep exploring: not a website generated once, but a website that is easy enough to keep shaping.