In progressPersonal · AI on the web · 2026

joSite

Retrofit AI assistants add friction; here the AI is the way in, not a box beside the work.

Role: Design and code, with Claude
When: Oct 2026 – now
Where it stands: In build, not live

The hook, built: the cards come in, and someone peeks out from under them.

11research studies before the build
1 of 4stages built: the hook

On this page

The problem

Retrofit AI assistants add friction, not help

“This is not just tackling designer portfolio, this is tackling a bigger problem. Is that the retrofit AI assistant on existing products is providing no help, it’s adding additional friction.”

Almost every site has one now: a button on top of an experience that wasn’t built for it. Its context is blunt: it knows the page you’re on, not what you looked at. It announces itself and waits for a prompt, and people expect it to know more than the page does. Portfolios have the same thing; in every “chat with my portfolio” I found, the chat sits beside the work instead of leading into it.

Two drawn pages side by side. Left: cards with a chat bubble in the corner saying “Hi! I’m an AI assistant.” Right: the same cards, with a thread running under them and a small figure peeking out between two cards. — Retrofit puts a box beside the work. Native makes the AI the way into it.

The idea

A house, a curtain and its resident

So the AI isn’t added to the site; the site is where it lives. The curtain is the site everyone sees. The house is everything under it: the sessions, notes and research behind each project. A small resident lives between the two. Four ideas hold it together:

Context is the root. Being alive, noticing and acting all grow from what it knows.
Nothing leaves until you say so. No model runs before you agree, not even a local one.
One world, one physics. Nothing comes in or goes out for no reason.
It shows, it doesn’t explain. Unless you act, it’s a normal site, and that’s the surprise.

A visit, in four stages

1Hook

2Consent

3Talk

4Contact

built

Only the hook runs without a model, and only the hook is built.

Pixel drawings of a loose grey knot of thread, from its fullest down to nearly a single line. — Drawn pixel by pixel. Distance costs him body, so he can only come partway out.

1
23 Oct · A chatbot first. A prototype that answered from my case-study text and checked every quote and number against it. It worked, and it was still a box beside the work.
2
24 Oct · The night it turned. “if I go the same route as everybody, have that site on Framer and try to retrofit this pad on there, it’s not gonna change. This is an agent native site. This is the project.”
3
24–30 Oct · Eleven studies. Embedded assistants and why they fail, agents that act on their own page, contextual awareness, the stack, the art style, the character and the voice.
4
30 Oct · The kickoff. The whole visit walked through, stage by stage: “we are building a house and a curtain and its resident.”
5
31 Oct · Who lives there. A character, a body and a way of moving, drawn together. Three goals: explore, proof, product. “It is not design with a little bit of product thinking with it.”
6
1–2 Nov · The real site. Off Framer, at a private address, matching the live site page for page; then the hook on the real bento, and three rounds on how he behaves: calmer, catchable, never over the cards.

Where it is

The hook is built; talking is next

The hook runs on the real site at every size, from phone to wide desktop. It’s in build, not live. Next is consent, one ask as short as it can be, then talk: the model acts only through tools, so the motion starts before any words, and nothing shows until it’s checked.

A strip of hand-drawn pixel frames of the same grey figure: rest, breath, shy, caught, scurry and far. — His frames so far, drawn by hand on a 16 × 16 grid.

For the techy: Astro for the pages, one page that never reloads once you’re in, a small world script on the Navigation API, a plain canvas loop for him, and one Cloudflare Worker that holds the key and the daily budget.

Next case studyShuttle →Shuttle is a clock drawn as an orbit. A dot goes around on real time, the trail is everywhere it has been, and you can pull the radius out until the curve reads as a straight line. It started with a dandelion.All work