Rebuilding a fifteen year old tool in one evening with an agent, without a CMS
Start from nothing, then decide what structure the result deserves.
- Answers
- What happens when you rebuild an old tool with an AI agent and no CMS at all?
- Topics
- AI · design · experiment · programming · web · work
- Full article on willem.com
- https://willem.com/en/2026-02-09_the-best-system-is-no-system/
Summary
In February 2026 I rebuilt a fifteen year old tool of mine in one evening with an AI agent, one hundred percent client side and without any of my own systems. The result changed how I think about all of them.
Full text
The exercise was to let go of the structures I built over the years, the content management system included, and see what the technology could do from a blank canvas. An old archive went in, a tool that runs entirely in the browser came out, in one evening. Most of my systems survived that test. The point was not the tool but the method: set out to learn as much as possible by temporarily dropping existing rules, and only afterwards decide what structure the result deserves. Within thirty-six hours the approach had already fed into new work, and by June it became MP1, the publisher that ships as a ZIP inside my own CMS.