This is an experience report on updating my (this!) website using coding agents and Beads ('a distributed, git-backed graph issue tracker for AI agents.').

Site update using coding agents

Over the past week, I used coding agents to update my website. The result is, at least I hope so, a cleaner design and new features, delivered faster than I could have managed alone and at a design standard I probably would not have achieved on my own either.

Context: in October, I moved my blog from Hashnode to a self hosted Zola site to take more control of my online presence and potentially support freelance work.

Tools

For improving the overall look and feel I mostly relied on Impeccable, which is built on Anthropic's original frontend-design skill.

It has a pretty clean and clear command set across diagnosis, audit, and several kinds of gradual improvements (e.g. /bolder). In my case, what definitely helped is that I already had a visual style in place I wanted to maintain: simple and burgundy-based.

I do not know how it compares to other kinds of frameworks, but for what I did I would recommend trying out Impeccable: easy setup and good workflows.

As for the 'AI assistance': I mostly used Codex and Opencode as coding agents, GPT-5.2 as a model for planning and analysis, and Kimi 2.5 and Gemini Flash 3 for implementation. For quality reviews, I relied entirely on the coding tools, aside from updating a size value here and there, so it's safe to say these updates were more vibe-coded as in its original definition than actually 'engineered'.

Changes made

Looking at the completed tasks list, I completed over 50, the most important changes, aside from the content overhaul:

  • Visual refresh, much cleaner and more appealing, I think.
  • Atom feed. Maybe I'll integrate a newsletter later, but at least people can subscribe.
  • Bluesky sidebar with live post rotation (note this is all handled on the client side)
  • Better code block readability in posts.
  • At the end of each post, instead of comments, I added a simple 'Want to respond?' section for basic interaction.
  • 'Tags' are now visible and browsable. I also added 'categories' ('Experience Report', 'How-to', etc.).

Last but not least: dark mode. I thought I was finished. Then, for the fun of it, I asked for a dark mode, which produced in one shot the style it has now. That definitely would have taken me ages to get right and now it took 10 mins. The only change I had to ask was regarding the styling and position of the dark mode toggle, that's it.

The LLM also came up with some fading effect when toggling dark mode. Normally I do not like the LLM to come up with extra stuff I did not ask for, but this one pleasantly surprised me so I kept it in. Try it ... I think it looks pretty nice.

Using Beads for the first time

For every project, I have a custom Markdown-based backlog or tracking system. Each one is a little different and works better or worse depending on when I came up with the project or started it. I have tried Task Master before, but I could not get it working reliably or easily. Enter Beads.

Beads markets itself as an AI native task tracker and I think it shows. The tool feels designed by someone who actually uses AI to get work done.

After installing it, you can simply use it from the command line. But you can also use it to initialise your coding agents' instruction set for your projects, which means instructions will be added to your AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md) file. (Note: if you are working in a shared repo, you can use Beads in a shared in stealth mode, to not interfere with others: bd init --stealth.)

I found it works reasonably well and is easy to start with bd quickstart. This is the first task management system I've worked with that has brought some consistency across my projects.

While using it, I've come up with some customisations in the form of skills:

  • Land the plane: Instead of repeating the same instructions to finish up a task, I created a skill instead of referencing the same commands in each agent instructions file. (I also needed some customization.)
  • Create task: The command line already has a nice way to create tasks as well, but when working with an agent I prefer to use my own skill that I can just ask to create a task while dictating.

Beads is actually a pretty good name, it is just easy to create tasks and start new tasks, in other words to keep going, one task, or bead, after another.

I will have to see how it holds up when a whole backlog starts building up, but based on experiences so far, I will continue using Beads to keep track of work on personal projects.