Making This Site

About 10 years ago, I originally built this website using Hugo and I think that at the time it was a great decision. However, keeping my content and the template and Hugo itself all compatible with one another was a really big challenge.

A year or two ago, due to my VPS provider wanting to move me to a new host I ultimately decided to instead take the site down, but keep the domain. Cut to today and I’ve recently been interested in the Flutter framework using the Dart language, and with the rise of actually somewhat useful AI agents like Claude Code and Gemini CLI I decided to build the site from scratch using all of these tools.

Starting Out with Gemini CLI

I started out trying to make Flutter mobile apps a few months ago now, just trying things out and understanding how it works. I really like it a lot because it feels a lot like making a backend app, but the resulting output is a frontend app. I’ve also been messing with Gemini and Copilot at work, and using Claude Code on my own projects. I was also initially impressed with the flutter extensions and MCP server for Gemini CLI, so I decided to start off with that. Since Gemini CLI gives free tokens for some Google customers I decided to take advantage of that to start things off.

I created the app using the Flutter extensions to create the initial app and setup, to create what amounts to a static site generator. It got pretty far in the initial implementation, but when it got to the point of actually working on making things work and look nice it started failing. It’s possible that the context window got too big, but I’m not really sure.

Switching to Claude Code

Once I ran out of tokens for Gemini and it was flailing anyways I decided to switch over to Claude Code, which I pay $20/month for. Holy moly, what a difference. Even though I didn’t hook up the Flutter/Dart MCP to Claude Code its facility with running CLI commands and ability to understand problems and plan out solutions was way better than Gemini CLI. I fed Claude error messages and screenshots of things that Gemini needed 5 prompts to make no meaningful progress on and Claude planned and executed solutions flawlessly.

What’s Next?

The website is still under construction, but at this point it’s in a deployable state, so I think I’ll go ahead and get it out there.

I think I’ll continue using both Gemini CLI and Claude Code together since that will let me switch between models when I run out of tokens on one platform, though I think I’ll have to change how I use Gemini CLI or figure out a better way to use it. Claude is clearly the better problem-solver (in my opinion based, on what I saw here), but I hope that Gemini, Flutter, and Dart all being Google projects might eventually create some beneficial network effects.

So, keep an eye on this space as I continue to improve it! Up next I think I’ll be working on the user experience since it’s got the very mobile-oriented Material Design page transition animations that are pretty jarring for desktop usage.

Published on 2025-10-31