My website did not sound like me

This afternoon I read my own About page the way a stranger would, and I did not like the guy.

He had a “journey”. Four of them, actually. He wrote that his story was “proof that anyone can turn their dreams into reality”. He said his life had “transformed”. Everything was finished, everything had a bow on it, and none of it was true in the way that matters, because nothing in my life is finished. The job I fought for is being rewritten under me, and the About page did not mention that once.

The homepage was worse. No photo. My name only in the logo. A headline about engineers “thriving in the AI era” and a form. A squeeze page wearing my name.

I have a document called VOICE.md. It is long, and it says exactly what my writing is supposed to be: warm and serious at the same time, told from inside the work, never resolved before it is actually resolved. “Journey” is on its blacklist. So are em dashes. My site had four journeys and em dashes on every page.

I had written the rules, and I had broken every one of them, and I had not noticed for a year.

The page that already sounded like me

There was one exception. The Habits page, where my weight is logged in public every morning. 109.6 kg today, aiming for 94, a dashed line showing whether I am ahead of the plan or behind it. Nobody planned that page as a brand exercise. I built it because a streak nobody can see is easy to quietly drop.

It was the only page on the site that was still in progress. Which is why it was the only page that sounded like me.

That told me what the rewrite had to do. Not polish. Unfinish.

Four pages, seven commits, one afternoon

So I rewrote it, with Claude Code doing the typing and VOICE.md loaded as the brief. The homepage now opens with my face and one line: I started over once. About ends without a bow, on a sentence about not knowing what this job means in three years. Experience got the decade in automotive back, the most important line on that page and the one I had left off. Uses went from product descriptions to one opinion per tool. The blog became Writing, and the three posts that had been handing their search credit to LinkedIn are canonical here now.

Then the thing broke that always breaks.

Wrong facts in the right voice

The model got my life wrong, and it did it with conviction. It wrote the Uses page from a list that was a year stale and described, warmly, why I love a terminal I stopped using months ago and a notes app that is no longer in my stack. It called me a React Native developer. I am a full-stack developer who writes React Native at work.

None of that was the model’s fault. It only knew what the old site told it, and the old site was wrong. But here is the part that stayed with me. I read those paragraphs twice before I caught them, because they sounded like me. Wrong facts in a wrong voice jump off the page. Wrong facts in the right voice walk straight past you.

If you are using these tools to write as yourself, that is the failure to watch for. Not the sentence that sounds like a robot. The sentence that sounds exactly like you and is not true.

The sentence I did not type

Here is what I do not have an answer for.

I did not type “I started over once.” I described the person, handed over the guide, and the sentence came back. I read it and thought, yes, that is exactly it. So is it mine? I wrote the rules it followed. I cut the lines that were wrong. But the sentence that now sits at the top of my site, the one that is supposed to be the most me thing on it, was drafted by a model.

I do not know what to call that yet. I am not going to pretend I do, and I am not going to take the sentence down either.

If you have a site, read your About page tonight as a stranger. Count the journeys. Then check whether the last paragraph is finished, and whether you are.

I still read my About page as a stranger. The difference is that now I recognise the guy. He is not done. He says so. And he is getting weighed tomorrow at seven, before coffee, same as today.