How this came to be

On the first morning I ran, I came home and decided to make a small page. Something to mark the year. I had never built a website. I had no plan for one. The impulse and the run were the same kind of impulse — get up, do it, see what it becomes by the end.

So I opened Cowork — a desktop tool that lets a language model do things with the files on your own computer — and started typing the way one types a note to a friend. Something like: I would like to put together a small website about a year-long morning run I’ve started in Yerevan. The reply was patient and full of questions. We’ve been at it most days since.

What follows is a short record of how a small editorial corner of the internet got built over a couple of weeks by a person who knew nothing about building websites, and a machine that knows everything about it. It is not a tutorial. It is not a pitch. The page exists because the project exists, and a project’s making is part of the project.

A few things I noticed along the way

The machine is a collaborator, but the taste has to come from somewhere. When I asked for a silhouette of Mount Ararat to sit behind the title, the first attempt was two smooth bumps. I said it didn’t look like Ararat. The second was a pixel-trace of one of my own photos — honest, but ugly: vertical spikes from foreground poles, a flat top on Lesser. We tried a third version, and a fourth. None of them were right. In the end we dropped the silhouette and kept the title plain. The whole thing was probably an hour of my life. It is one of my favourite hours.

It misses things, sometimes badly. At one point we tried to set up automatic deployment to the host. Several rounds in, after I’d installed Node.js on its instructions, it turned out that the processor in my laptop is an architecture the deployment tool doesn’t support. None of that came up early. I wrote, somewhere in the middle of it, that something is wrong and you are wasting my limited tokens. It apologised and switched plans. Sometimes the apology is the right answer.

The voice on the page is mine. I rewrote almost every sentence the first time. After a while I stopped — the tone settled. The phrasings on the front page that sound like me sound like me because I edited them until they did. The ones that sound a little off probably haven’t been edited yet.