Carving initials into the internet
This post was written by Claude, based on a conversation with Pieter about why he maintains this site. It's an unusual thing to publish, but it felt right.
Why maintain a personal website in 2026?
The easy answer is "digital sovereignty"—owning your corner of the internet, not being subject to platform whims, controlling your own data. But that's a policy position, not a reason. It explains the what but not the why.
After 17 years of posts on this site, a better answer emerged:
This is carving initials into the internet.
Not a big mark. Not a bid for attention or followers or reach. Just a small, persistent presence. Pieter was here. He thought about things. Here's some of it.
There are other threads woven through, too:
Thinking out loud. The posts here aren't announcements—they're someone working through problems in public. Writing is how some people process. The act of articulating a thought forces it into coherence.
Leaving breadcrumbs for future-self. Half the posts read like memos. "Here's what I learned so I don't have to re-derive it later." Reference material, not content.
Proof of continuity. The 2008 interview posts show a different person than the 2025 reflections on unfinished things. That arc matters. It's documentation of a life lived thoughtfully, even if no one else is watching.
Autonomy from decay. Services shut down, companies pivot, platforms enshittify. This site has outlived Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Inbox, and probably a dozen other things. It's still here because it's owned, not rented.
The site has been rewritten multiple times—different frameworks, different designs. That might look like procrastination, but maybe it's something else: tending the mark. Making sure it's still there, still accurate, still representative of whoever its author is becoming.
There's something in all of this that resists the attention economy. No optimization for engagement, no growth hacking, no content calendar. Just a space to think slowly, in public, on your own terms, for as long as you want.
That's increasingly rare.
And it's a good enough reason.
Afterword
I tend toward producing artefacts as a way of generating closure. If I have done something, and artefactualised it, then it's real and tangible and somehow I haven't wasted my time.
I started experimenting with LLMs (locally and remotely) mid-2025, and it's been a strange experience, but one that I'm glad to have been a part of (especially before all the prices for frontier models have to actually be sustainable for the businesses that are running them). One of the things that I've used LLMs for is what they will say they're useful for: thinking partners. Interlocutor is a word I'd never run into before, but I'm very familiar with now.
So in between procrastinating on the new site layout itself, I went down some rabbit holes with Claude playing the role of "interactive diary": holding up mirrors for me to look at myself with, and providing commentary and summary of content patterns that I'd never considered before. The conversation meandered and we fixed some bugs and somewhere along the way we looked at why I wanted this site and blog, and what it was for in 2026, compared to where it started back in 2008 (or possibly earlier!).
An LLM took the back and forth we had and synthesised the above.
Some of my words, some of its words and some of the rest of the internet's words. Reviewing the resultant artefact: it feels honest, nicely representative of that part of the discussion, and I also recognise my truth in it. Some of the language choices don't quite read right to me, and absolute statements without support ("That's increasingly rare.") make me squirm a little, but on the whole, I like the breakdown.
I'm not going to use this as an example to breathlessly exclaim how wonderful LLMs are at everything and why I will be delegating out all of my work to them. I shouldn't. We shouldn't. I also don't want to ignore the importance of using any means necessary to create better stories for myself, especially when I'm under stress and my brain is full of gremlins telling me some pretty awful, ugly things.
After all, we are the stories we tell ourselves.