A few weeks ago, my blog looked like it hadn’t been touched since 2015. Honestly, it hadn’t. It was running a theme called “Decode,” which had served me well through years of Adobe AEM consulting work. As I’ve shifted my focus toward AI in 2025 and beyond, the old design felt like wearing a suit from a decade ago. It fit, technically. But it wasn’t me anymore.
So I decided to do something I’d been putting off: redesign the whole thing. And this time, I brought an AI along for the ride.
Starting with a Conversation, Not a Brief
Instead of opening Figma or hunting for a new WordPress theme, I started with a conversation. I described what I wanted: something dark and sophisticated, with a sense of forward momentum. Something that said “I’ve spent 15 years in enterprise tech and I’m now exploring what AI can do.” Within minutes, I had a design direction: deep navy backgrounds, gold accents, Playfair Display serif headlines paired with DM Sans for body text.
What surprised me was how quickly the back-and-forth narrowed things down. I didn’t need to browse 50 theme demos or fill out a creative brief. I described the feeling I was after, and the AI translated that into concrete design decisions: hex codes, font pairings, layout philosophy.
From Design to Working Code
The next step was building an actual WordPress theme. I’m not a developer by trade. My background is in digital transformation and AEM architecture. So writing PHP templates and CSS from scratch wasn’t something I was going to do alone. The AI generated every file: functions.php, header.php, index.php, custom template parts, the works.
We went through several rounds of iteration. The nav was showing a duplicate LinkedIn link. The timeline section was missing three of four items. The profile photo wasn’t loading. Each bug was flagged, diagnosed, and fixed in the same conversation: no Stack Overflow, no freelancer, no waiting.
By the end of the session, I had a complete custom theme packaged as a zip file, ready to upload directly to WordPress.
What the Theme Actually Does
The new theme, which I’m calling “Armaghan AI,” does a few things I’m genuinely proud of. It hides all my pre-2025 posts from the frontend, those AEM and enterprise CMS posts were good at the time, but they’re not what this blog is about anymore. It features a hero section with a profile card pulled from my real headshot. It has a journey timeline that traces my path from AEM consultant to AI explorer. And it renders posts in a clean featured-plus-grid layout that looks good on mobile.
None of this took weeks. It took one focused session.
What I Learned
The biggest shift for me wasn’t technical, it was psychological. I’ve spent years managing large enterprise implementations where every design decision went through committees and change management processes. The idea that I could just describe something and have it built, immediately, in a single conversation, still feels a little unreal.
AI didn’t replace the judgment calls. I still had to decide what the blog was for, who it was for, and what story it should tell. But it collapsed the distance between idea and execution in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to as I explore AI tools in 2026: it’s not automation replacing work. It’s dramatically shortening the loop between intention and result. For someone who’s spent a career helping large organizations move faster, that’s the most important capability shift I’ve seen.
The specifics of how this plays out in practice are what the next few posts are about. If you’ve done something similar or are thinking about it, I’d be glad to compare notes.