Confession: my personal website, adamnoah.com, had become a fossil. The kind of site you keep paying hosting for out of guilt, where every update is filed under “I’ll get to that this weekend.”
I’ve been using Grok Bot, an AI desktop assistant, for a while now, and I finally pointed it at the fossil. I expected a chatbot that tells me how to fix my site. What I got was something that actually went and did it, then showed me what it changed.
What it actually did
No hype, just the list. These are real things it did on my sites:
- Publications. It took my long-form CV, a Word doc that had grown into a monster, and turned it into a modern Publications page, looking up a DOI link for every paper. Along the way it caught inconsistencies in my CV and checked conference meeting numbers against sources instead of trusting past me. Past me was not reliable.
- Bio. It wrote a new Bio page and kept the age-revealing dates off. Vanity is a valid requirement.
- Home page. It rebuilt the home page from my photos, a looping lab video, and a short synopsis I gave it. That’s it. I didn’t hand it a design spec.
- Sports. It created a Sports section and a Pre-ECNL page for my daughter’s soccer team that pulls real standings and results, and refreshes on its own every Sunday night. No made-up numbers. It was weirdly strict about that.
- Ads. It set up AdSense on adamnoah.com and on this site, snarky.tech, and in the process found that the ads.txt file on both sites had the wrong publisher ID. Which is the kind of thing that quietly costs you money for who knows how long.
- This blog. It’s now drafting snarky.tech posts, featured images included, which I then review, argue with, and edit before anything goes live.
The part I didn’t expect: it backs things up before it changes them, it takes screenshots to check its own work, and when something on a site was outside what it could safely fix, it told me instead of doing something clever and terrifying.
The work side
My day job is neuroscience at Yale, which comes with an impressive amount of not-neuroscience. Grok Bot helps with things like drafting, data wrangling, keeping CVs and grant materials organized, and generally reducing the number of browser tabs I have open at 11 PM.
I also run a few specialized bots for specific jobs. One converts fNIRS, fMRI, and EEG data into NWB format for sharing on DANDI. There’s a grants bot and a paper bot. They’re not magic, and I still check everything, but the boring, error-prone parts of research data handling are exactly where this stuff shines.
The snark section
Is it perfect? No. You still have to know what you want, read what it did, and say “no, not like that” sometimes. If you don’t know what a DOI or an ads.txt file is, it’ll happily explain, but you’re still the one approving the changes. That’s a feature. I don’t want an assistant that publishes things to my site without asking.
But compared with years of “I’ll get to that this weekend”? My website is fun again. I actually want to work on it, which is a sentence I did not expect to type.
Transparency note: posts on this site, including this one, are now drafted with help from Grok Bot. I review and edit them before they’re published, and the opinions (and the snark) are mine.
