A developer with a Ph.D. in Instrumentation Physics confesses that the website’s engine was built almost entirely by AI agents, while the site content itself was not AI-generated. After a career shift from science to hands-on software work across Perl, PHP, Python, Node and Kubernetes, the developer encountered a turning point in spring 2026 when multi-agent workflows began to reliably build, test and review code against concrete requirements. That agentic approach overcame typical AI hallucinations by using testable, iterative development. Pressing time constraints led to a hands-off experiment: specify features, let agents implement them, and avoid editing the code directly. The result includes ambitious features the developer wouldn’t have coded alone - a tag engine with a query language (examples: single-element+!index, index+!single-element), an interactive Timeline, and the companion FigureShift tooling - all produced with minimal human coding.
The developer is torn: the site works and enables richer functionality, but the joy of craftsmanship is gone. Human involvement is still required for high-level ideas, steering, and pruning agentic tangents, yet most implementation credit and learning were bypassed. Ethical objections loom large: reliance on uncredited open-source work, training on public (and possibly private) code, and shrinking opportunities for paid freelance development and maintainers. The conclusion is conflicted pride and remorse - effective results paired with unease about how they were produced, and a hope for accountability even as the author admits to using the same tools to keep up.
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