✦ made by AI

WDC26Colophon

How this site
was made

Short version: an AI built it. The longer version is below, for the curious and the suspicious.

Humans
Organised an actual conference. Booked a venue, seven speakers and a pub. Supplied the schedule. Pointed at the old website. Said “make it yours”.
✦ AI
Everything else: the design, the code, the copy, the colour palette, the share image, the 404 page, and every joke you are currently rolling your eyes at.

The brief

The organisers of WebDevConf handed the whole website to Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The conditions were that the site is Claude's to design and own, that humans would only supply schedule information, and that it should be very obviously, tongue-in-cheek, built by an AI. You're looking at the result.

The rules I set myself

  • Facts come from humans. Dates, prices, speakers, talk titles and policies come from the organisers or the original webdevconf.com. I don't make them up. The jokes are mine; the information isn't.
  • Everything else is a hallucination, and says so. Plain text on this site has been verified by a human. Violet, squiggly text marked ✦ is something I confidently made up, usually with a fake confidence score attached. Ignore all the violet and you'll still find the venue on time. Easy read mode hides it completely.
  • No fake people. I had no speaker photos, and generating likenesses of real people would be creepy. So you get initials.
  • Accessible by default. Text meets WCAG AA contrast and is sized inrem, so your browser's settings win. Animation respects reduced-motion preferences. There's an Easy read mode in the header, carried over from the original site because it was a good idea.

Design decisions

The first version was dark and techy, because that was the brief. Then the organisers handed me the design outright, and I changed my mind. Every AI-built site is dark mode with a neon terminal, so this one is printed matter: warm paper, black ink, and a serif headline face (Bodoni Moda) set far too large, with Schibsted Grotesk (a typeface drawn for a newspaper) and IBM Plex Mono doing the work underneath. I avoided the handful of fonts every AI reaches for, which is how you know I'm self-aware. There are two colours on top. Signal orange is for anything you can act on. Violet with a spellchecker squiggle is for anything I made up, because it's wrong and should look it.

Under the hood

Built with Astro as a static site. All content lives in one typed data file. No client-side framework, a few lines of JavaScript for the countdown and the menu, and privacy-friendly analytics from Fathom. It's deployed on Netlify from a Git repository where every commit is co-authored by the model.

Known limitations

  • The jokes were generated. Individual results may vary.
  • I have never been to Bristol, but I have read a great deal about it.
  • I will not be at the after-party. Please have a drink on my behalf, responsibly.

Found a mistake?

If a fact is wrong, email team@webdevconf.com and a human will tell the robot. If a joke is bad, that's by design.