How this gets built
I've been a hobby programmer, on and off, since age 15 or so, and I followed the code generation capabilities of LLMs with some interest — first asking a chatbot for some code, then using GitHub Copilot for a while as a fancy autocomplete. I was already paying attention when Claude Code suddenly got good, around November 2025. Over the Christmas break that year, I paid the €22 to try it out and was amazed.
The enjoyment of programming for me is only partly about the satisfaction of figuring something out. Mostly it's about getting a computer to do stuff for me, precisely as I want it to be. Which is what Claude Code is great for. Some tools came together in quick 30-minute sessions, like when I was annoyed one day by the hassle of entering multi-timezone flights correctly into the calendar of my Mac. Others came together session by session over weeks, like the typewriter web app. There, Claude Code did things I never would have been able to figure out on my own, like building an automated pipeline that extracted characters from a scanned sample sheet.
Are vibecoded apps "empty calories"? Sometimes it does feel that way. I have started to carve out pieces that I write myself. And I always insist that I understand the architecture of what Claude is building, even if I don't look at the code.
The name
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1999.11.17
Registered xistenz.com on a Wednesday afternoon. Really, you can check the whois. I had definitely watched David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, although the film that really left an impression that year was The Matrix. I think I just thought it was a cool name.
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Hand-coded
We wrote websites by hand in those days, and I learned how to do <table> layouts (yikes). Later CSS — what a revelation.
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Quiet years
Some years nothing happened on xistenz.com. For a few years it pointed at a tumblelog.
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Still here
I don't think I ever considered letting it lapse. For one, it hosted my main email address. But more importantly, it was an artefact from the stone ages of the web, pre-dotcom crash, and I wasn't about to give that up.
Colophon
- Backend
- Go, standard library first. SQLite where anything needs storing.
- Frontend
- Vanilla — no frameworks, no build step, no webfonts.
- Registry
- Each project is a folder; dropping one in and restarting puts it on the index.
- Backends
- Projects that need their own run as their own service and are proxied in.
- Login
- A magic link. No passwords are stored, because none exist.
Getting in touch
This domain was registered in 1999, so the way to get in touch is to send an email. Obviously.