Developing semicon-tantra.org

Someone I know has started a nonprofit in Pune that provides a platform for people in the semiconductor industry to connect. This person is very close to me and has been asking me to review code for the website developed by a consultancy and deploy it. As usual, I had been procrastinating and was also busy with a lot of other things. Reviewing code written by someone else is always a tough job.

This March 2026, during my India visit, I had a 14-day vacation from my office and decided to finally put some effort into it. After some discussion, we ended up deciding that rather than reviewing the code and deploying it and adding more features, let’s build the entire website from scratch. I thought this was the right time to make use of AI agents to help me develop this.

Since I already had a visual representation of how the website should look and what features it has, I made a mental model of smaller pieces of the website that can be put together one by one. As the agent builds each smaller piece, one at a time, it would be easier to review them and then proceed to the next. I ended up getting the Windsurf Pro trial, since I was comfortable using it from the office. It took me 3 days to build the entire website end-to-end with all the functionalities, deploy it, and make it online for the public.

I was not so impressed with AI until then, but building this made me realize how good it has become and the superpower it gives you. I could understand why my tech company eliminated all the junior SDE roles and is looking at AI metrics for each developer. One could argue that a lot of use of AI does not correlate to a lot of meaningful code delivered. I mean, I myself ask AI to do minor replace-all changes in a file or, given a staging curl, get me a production curl for the same. This experience has made me realize how easy it has become to develop anything, if one comes from a good technical background. Ended up getting Windsurf Pro for myself. Looking forward to getting a lot of things done using this.