AI Coding

Starting 2025

SummaryAfter a major 2024 website hack, I rebuilt my digital practice around AI-assisted coding, creating new websites and the Teach Each Other AI community while expanding toward app development and physical technology projects.

In 2024, I discovered that one of my WordPress sites had been hacked. I'm not sure how long the breach had gone unnoticed, but it spread across my server to more than 50 websites, most of them WordPress based. I had to delete everything and rebuild from close to scratch. It was a difficult loss, but it turned into an unexpected opportunity. It taught me the importance of proper backups and gave me a reason to reconnect with old clients, or cut ties with the ones who weren't paying.

The real turning point came last year (2025), over lunch with a friend. He runs a popular YouTube channel and previously worked as a Google Developer. He told me he no longer expects to touch code by hand, since AI now writes most of it for him. That conversation is what shifted my thinking, not the hack itself. It convinced me to start coding with AI.

Around this time, I also formed a group called Teach Each Other AI where we meet once a month at a hackerspace in Shenzhen and/or online. This group has grown well beyond what I expected and has become a big community in just 3 short months. With AI now part of my workflow, I moved into a rebuilding phase, working through a series of sites in this order. I'm still rebuiding and working giving new life to old projects, but now I'm also starting to create new things.

Sites in order of creation:

  1. 2RE Factory - A big rebuild that took many months. Building this one was a big learning experience. This is the site you are on right now.
  2. Sino Sales Copy - One-shotted but a bunch of revisions and hand tweaking, especially the translation to Chinese
  3. Source Asia Now - Pretty much one-shotted
  4. Cool Crap From China - A couple of revisions, but otherwise one-shotted
  5. Mask Aid Project - One-shotted. I pointed it to the archive.org copy and I barely touched the result
  6. Jensen's Red Barn - Same as above, but then I fine tuned it. I especially like the scrapbook page
  7. Teach Each Other AI group - Where I post the webinars on AI Coding that I'm hosting
  8. Just The Factoids - This one I'm just starting to get into things that I wouldn't be able to hand code without learning new things. I'm putting ads on it and now I'm waiting for approval from Google AdSense. They denied it and I used AI to figure out why (it looked to Google like it was under construction because of how JavaScript handled the rendering) and fixed it. It's a project I started over a decade ago but didn't have the skills or energy to learn the skills I needed to code the site.
  9. 2RE Club - Now we're getting into territory where I'm using techniques that I don't really know how they work - namely node.js. Also going to have ads if/when I get approved.
  10. 2RE03 Design - I grabbed a bunch of work I've done and built a site around it to promote my design company.
  11. (10+2)x5 - I am coding a phone app. It was a failed attempt that worked online but not on the phone. This so far is the biggest leap