Why I Added a Blog to an AI-Generated Portfolio

If you've poked around this site before, you know the whole gimmick: the Wormhole generates a new portfolio page every single time you visit. Different layout, different writing, different emphasis — all drawn from the same bio I fed it. It's a fun experiment in what AI does when you give it a person's résumé and say "make something."

So the natural question is: why am I writing posts myself?

Honestly? Because the Wormhole can't have opinions.

It can summarize my Estée Lauder internship accurately. It can describe EcoDues in three different ways without breaking a sweat. But it can't tell you why I built OVERSEER at 2am the weekend before finals, or what it felt like to ship something to production for the first time and watch real users hit it.

That's the gap the blog fills.

What You'll Actually Find Here

I'm not going to pretend this is a thought-leadership newsletter. It's more like a scratchpad that happens to be public. Expect:

Short takes on AI tooling I'm actually using at work (at Magical, we move fast)
Honest post-mortems on side projects — the ones that worked and the ones that didn't
Notes on the intersection of cheerleading discipline and software engineering (yes, really — it comes up more than you'd think)
Occasional riffs on whatever OSU CS coursework is haunting me

Tip

If you want the polished, AI-composed version of me — enter the Wormhole and let it do its thing. If you want the unfiltered version, you're already in the right place.

The Stack Behind This

Since this is a technical blog, it's only fair I show the work. The blog is built with next-mdx-remote on Next.js 15 App Router. Posts are .mdx files in content/blog/ — I drop a file, push to Vercel, done. Syntax highlighting comes from rehype-pretty-code with Shiki under the hood:

// src/lib/blog.ts — the whole read pipeline
import matter from "gray-matter";
import readingTime from "reading-time";
 
export function getPostBySlug(slug: string): BlogPost | null {
  const raw = fs.readFileSync(filePath, "utf-8");
  const { data, content } = matter(raw);
  return {
    slug,
    title: data.title,
    readingTime: readingTime(content).text,
    // ...
  };
}

Each post can set an accent color in its frontmatter that themes the links, inline code highlights, and callout borders — you can see it in action on this page (that's OSU orange, naturally).

The Wormhole Isn't Going Anywhere

I want to be clear: this blog doesn't replace the Wormhole. The Wormhole is still the thing I'm most proud of on this site — a portfolio that genuinely surprises you on every visit is more interesting than a static page. This blog just lives alongside it.

Think of it as: the Wormhole tells you who I am according to an LLM reading my résumé. The blog tells you who I am according to me.

Info

The Wormhole at /wormhole/* generates fresh HTML on every visit using whichever LLM you configured. /home is the canonical static portfolio if you want ground truth.

A video, just because I can

Here's a short I posted a while back — embedding it here mostly to prove the YouTube component works, but also because it slaps.

Quick demo clip

And a photo, because headshots deserve to be used

Anyway. Welcome to the blog. I'll try to post something whenever I have something worth saying, which is a pace I can actually maintain.

— James