RIP Tumblr - Vibecoding a new blog

I had a couple of hours on a train yesterday and I wanted to try out Claude Code. I've been playing with Cursor and Windsurf a lot in the past month and I wanted to see how it stacks up.

My list of side projects has long included "Get off Tumblr", so this felt like the perfect opportunity.

I don't have very much to report. It basically just worked. First, Claude wrote a script to scrape (the old) tomblomfield.com and turn all the blog posts into markdown files.

It then built a simple site structure using Next.js and decided to host it on Vercel. The site is statically generated, so it should be blazing fast. There are no database calls at all.

I use Github to store all the markdown files, so I get version control for free. Tiptap is my WYSIWYG editor and I create/update posts by making simple calls to the Github API.

I added Posthog for analytics, so I can finally see how many people are actually reading these posts. My old Google Analytics implementation on my old site broke at least 5 years ago and I never got around to fixing it.

All-in, it cost me $15 in Claude credits and about 3 hours of my time to migrate off Tumblr and onto a custom blog.

As for Claude Code vs Windsurf or Terminal? Claude Code feels more like a junior developer that you give instructions to and come back a few minutes later to see the results. It's more of a black box. I prefer watching Windsurf think through each step with more verbose output, and I actually like the fact that it's part of an IDE so I can navigate to files quickly and make tiny tweaks to my code. I'm just not as comfortable in a terminal 🤷‍♂️. Professional software engineers might feel differently.

Overall, I am more and more convinced that people and companies are going to be able to point an LLM at an existing SaaS product and simply say "build me a version of this site".

Because this site is built for n=1 users, it can be super simple. Adding hundreds of configuration options to support thousands of different use-cases is what makes software bloated and difficult to maintain.

If you're only building for yourself, you can get away with <1% of the code.