Reviving the Zombie Side Project: Why I’m Rebuilding My Blog Again, but in the Age of AI Agents
Part 1 of the “From WordPress to AI Agents” Series
I am a Product Manager by trade, but I have always been a tinkerer at heart.
There is a specific joy in building new things, breaking things, and occasionally fixing them. But let’s be honest: for those of us who don’t code eight hours a day, the “friction” of building is real. You have a great product idea, but then you get stuck configuring Webpack, fighting with CSS, or debugging a broken deployment.
Eventually, the project hibernates.
For me, that project is my travel blog, WanderingBong. It started years ago on WordPress, evolved into a custom Headless CMS during the pandemic lockdown, and then… sat there. It gathered digital dust because the cost of “tinkering” became too high compared to the free time I had available.
The Paradigm Shift
But recently, I felt a shift. We are entering a new age of software building.
It isn’t just about ChatGPT writing a function for you. It is about Coding Agents and Agentic Workflows.
Code is becoming cheap. The cost of iteration — that painful cycle of “write, review, fix, repeat” — is plummeting. For a Product Manager, this is a superpower. It means the barrier between “Writing a Spec” and “Shipping a Feature” is dissolving.
I realized I couldn’t just read about this shift. I had to feel it. I needed to understand how we will build software in the future — how we will tackle hackathons and side projects when we have an infinite supply of junior engineers at our fingertips.
From Coding to Orchestrating So, I am waking the project up. I’m not just “migrating” the blog; I’m rebuilding it as a playground for this new reality.
I am moving from a system where I manually type every line to an architecture where AI Agents work alongside me as my engineering team.
The Roadmap: Building in Public Over the next few weeks, I’m documenting this journey. It’s a log of a PM trying to build a modern, AI-infused content platform without losing their mind.
Here is the plan:
The Evolution: Looking back at the “WordPress to Headless” journey and why the old stack became a cage.
The Tech Stack: A deep dive into the “boring” but reliable infrastructure (Node.js, EC2) that acts as the foundation.
Agentic Workflows: The real breakthrough — how I’m using Model Context Protocol (MCP) to let AI agents talk directly to my backend to audit content and draft posts.
The Vision: How this changes the product itself, moving from static posts to “Anchor Articles” and dynamic storytelling.
The stack is still my reliable “boring” monorepo, but the way I interact with it is completely new.
Code is cheap. Ideas are expensive. Let’s see what we can build when the friction disappears.