GenAI Reflection

Reflection on using GenAI

For this lab, I used Pi Coding Agent to help scaffold the Quarto website, create pages, and automate some of the more tedious setup work.

How GenAI helped

Pi Coding Agent was useful for:

  • Creating the default Quarto website structure.
  • Setting up multiple pages in a consistent format.
  • Editing navigation and page files efficiently.
  • Turning my ideas into readable Markdown sections.
  • Reducing repetitive work so that I could focus on the website’s direction.

In this sense, GenAI acted like a technical assistant. It helped with implementation speed, but it did not replace the decisions behind the website.

What remained human-led

The most important parts of the process were still based on my own judgement:

  • Choosing what personal information to share.
  • Deciding which projects best represent my interests.
  • Selecting GitHub visualisations as the data story.
  • Shaping the tone and purpose of the website.
  • Reviewing whether the generated content matched my intent.

Coding is the easy part; the human ideas, decisions, and creative direction are what make the website personal.

This includes the styling and content choices. The tool could generate drafts and automate edits, but I still had to decide what was meaningful, accurate, and appropriate to publish.

What was useful or challenging

The most useful part was the speed of iteration. Instead of manually creating every page from scratch, I could describe the intended structure and have the agent produce a working version quickly.

The main challenge was making sure the website still sounded like me. GenAI can produce polished text, but polished text is not always personal or precise. I had to guide the content so that it reflected my actual interests in AI research, tooling, and experimentation.

Takeaway

My takeaway is that GenAI is most valuable when used as a collaborator for execution, not as a substitute for thinking. It can help scaffold, format, and accelerate work, but the responsibility for direction, accuracy, and reflection remains with the human user.