Today I updated the website to use Hugo instead of Jekyll. This has been on my list of things to do for some time. It should be easier than it is - that was the whole reason I used Jekyll in the first place. Anyway, after several attempts at doing this myself and failing, I decided to let Github Copilot have a go.

I started by renaming the old site to “dev-old.codewrite.co.uk” and then asked Copilot to convert it from Jekyll to a new Hugo site at “dev.codewrite.co.uk”. It took ages (well minutes but I consider that a long time), but it did quite a good job. It summarized what it had done in the readme.md (which I’ve kept in the repo). Rather than editing what it had done I decided to go the full “vibe coding” way, and just asked it to fix things that didn’t look good.

I started by saying the layout wasn’t good, so it fixed it. I then asked it to fix the header and footer, which again, it did. I probably wasn’t specific enough about what I wanted, but I guess that’s all part of the learning process using AI tools.

I realized that the layout of the old site wasn’t brilliant, although I think some things have broken by themselves over the years as Jekyll has been updated. This documentation is really for my benefit, so that I can see what I did months or even years ago. So I don’t really want to waste too much time making it look nice.

I am on the free Github Copilot plan, and this has used about 42% of my monthly allowance. I have been considering upgrading to the paid plan, but need to be sure I will use it enough. I’m nearly there… ;)

I’ve left the old website at “dev-old.codewrite.co.uk” and you can see both code bases in Github.