Convert my website to Grav: four words, and then something remarkable

  • Motivating ImagesAn image is never merely a record; it is always already an interpretation. What we see, we have helped to shape through the frames we look with: culture, expectation, history. "Moving" points to process: images are not static but in continuous reconstruction, like the organisations and identities they reflect. To hold an image to be fixed is to freeze what is in essence fluid.
  • Animated VoicesEvery voice carries a claim on reality, spoken from a specific position in the social field. Speaking is not a neutral transfer of facts but an act that helps to construct the world: whoever speaks helps to determine what can be heard. The plural "voices" points to polyphony: truth arises not from one authoritative statement, but from the friction between perspectives.
  • Clarity of MindClarity here is not a synonym for simplicity but for lived ordering: the capacity to see through one's own constructions without mistaking them for fixed truth. A thought becomes clear only when it is aware of its own constructedness, of the fact that it is one possible ordering among many. This is reflective capacity at its core: thinking about one's own thinking.
  • Ideas in ActionAn idea proves itself not in abstraction, but in the action it makes possible. Because we produce our reality, every idea is at the same time an intervention: it changes, however subtly, what is subsequently experienced as "real". Practical here does not mean instrumentally simple, but responsible: the idea that acknowledges its own creative power and acts accordingly.
René de Baaij

16 July 2026 · René de Baaij

English BlogHuman-AI #AI#Human-AI#Grav

"Convert my website to Grav."

That was the whole request. Four words, typed almost as an afterthought on a Thursday morning. I had a WordPress site that had grown heavy over the years, and a quiet sense that I wanted something lighter, something I could genuinely own. I did not have a plan. I had a sentence.

What followed has changed how I think about working with AI, and since that is precisely what I advise organisations on, I want to set it down honestly.

It began as a conversation, not a command. Claude did not simply rush to "do the task". It asked what mattered to me: how I liked to work, whether I preferred to edit locally, how much I cared about privacy. Only then did it recommend Grav, a flat-file system with no database, and lay out the trade-offs in plain language instead of jargon.

Then it built. Not a generic template, but a theme drawn from the actual stylesheet of my existing site, so the warm colours, the typeface and the feel of the thing were mine from the first draft. When my images refused to appear on the inner pages, it found the reason, a relative path where an absolute one was needed. When the language switch quietly sent English visitors back to Dutch, it traced the cause to a single setting and corrected it. When a submenu kept slipping away from the cursor, it recognised the old gap between menu and submenu and bridged it.

The scope grew, steadily and without drama. A complete theme, with the fonts hosted on my own site rather than pulled from elsewhere. A bilingual result, Dutch and English, with the whole interface switching cleanly between the two. My entire archive, fifty-seven articles across two twelve-part series, lifted out of WordPress and rebuilt as clean pages, each keeping its original date and its old address so that nothing broke and nothing was lost. Then categories and tags, and a filter that lets a reader choose a language and a subject and arrive exactly where they meant to go.

I want to be honest about one thing, because honesty is the whole point. This was not magic, and it was not effortless. It was a collaboration. I looked, I tested, I said "this is not right yet", and it listened and adjusted. It told me plainly when something could not be done the way I first imagined, and offered a better route. It owned its own mistakes and put them right without fuss. That, more than any single feature, is what stayed with me. I was not managing a tool. I was working alongside a partner that kept its head while I kept changing my mind.

There is a lesson here that reaches well past websites. The leaders I work with are asking the same question I asked that morning, only larger: what does AI change, and who am I within it? My small experiment offered a clear answer. The value did not come from handing the work away. It came from staying in the room. From bringing judgement, taste and direction, and letting the machine carry the weight of execution. The human did not disappear. The human became more necessary, not less.

So here is my website, lighter and entirely my own. It started with four words. What it taught me was worth far more than the site.

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