Are Personal Websites the New Resume?
How AI is powering the rise of ‘digital living rooms’
I spent the past week building my personal website.
It’s taken years of procrastination and mulling over whether I should even do it.
It always felt vain and unnecessarily expensive to have a personal site until a few recent cultural shifts made me completely rethink their place in the future of work.
First, more employers are demanding personal websites and portfolios.
If you’ve applied to jobs in the last few years, you’ve definitely noticed this creeping trend. Lodged somewhere between the field for resume, cover letter, and LinkedIn URL is the “personal website/portfolio” form field. Sometimes optional, but increasingly not.
It’s kind of like what happened with the LinkedIn URL field in the 2010s. It snuck its way into application forms at a time when social media was taking off and having a LinkedIn profile was a way to signal both a professional brand and social media fluency.
Although not every application form today has the LinkedIn URL field, leaving it empty still leaves the uncomfortable feeling of leaving a stone unturned in a fiercely competitive job market where standing out of the crowd has never been more important.
But LinkedIn started to become insufficient when hiring managers started looking for more individuality in a sea of sameness from candidates applying with identical backgrounds. There’s only so much you can optimize your LinkedIn profile to stand out from other LinkedIn profiles. And this is where personal sites come in.
Personal Sites as Fluency Portfolios
With the tools for creating them now readily available thanks to AI, personal sites in 2026 are just as much about communicating technical fluency as they’re about communicating professional identity. Today, when AI fluency is at a premium, having a personal site built by AI tools (which takes an afternoon) allows you to construct your own ‘digital living room’ to present your profession and your craft cohesively.
LinkedIn’s 2025 AI Labor Market Update reported that job postings requiring AI literacy skills are growing at more than 70% year over year as of early 2026. When a recruiter visits your site and sees something personal beyond what a paid developer could produce, they see both your personality and proof that you can collaborate with AI to produce something real.
In a job market where everyone claims AI skills but few can demonstrate them, a personal site becomes the portfolio for AI fluency, the most important professional skill of the decade.
Personal Sites as Identity Anchors
I learned while journaling recently that your profession and your craft are two very different things. Your profession is what you’re paid to do while your craft is what you can’t help but do.
Communicating your profession is easy; there’s CVs and LinkedIn for that. But communicating your craft? Now, that’s much harder, especially when it doesn’t fit neatly with your profession.
Take an example from Nnamdi Iregbulem, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent Black investors and a personal idol.
His site opens with a clear declaration of his identity at the top: “venture investor and writer”, embracing both his profession and his craft while his LinkedIn header which reads “Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners” leans exclusively on his profession.
You could likely tell that he writes from the fact that he shares some of his writing on LinkedIn, but his site lets him claim that identity cohesively in a way that also communicates his personal taste.
Personal Sites as Taste Signatures
When I sat down to build my personal site last week, I didn’t write any code.
I simply described what I wanted in natural language. I wanted something that felt like walking into someone’s home, but online, where one leaves feeling like they’ve just spent time getting to know a real person. So I whipped out Claude Code to start building.
While Claude handled all of the execution, I owned all of the taste: choosing the graph paper background; selecting the symbols (◆, ▲, ✦) as a visual motif; picking a color palette; defining the tone of voice; and deciding on the information hierarchy.
I kept a ‘devjournal’ to log my prompts (almost 3K words of them) and micro-decisions I made across the 21 different versions Claude coded up for me. I wanted to be able to reflect on the efficiency of my prompting and the overall build process when I asked Claude for the build report, which I always use to learn how to build more efficiently next time.
This is the underappreciated dimension of AI-built personal websites: they’re taste tests. Two people can use the exact same tools, spend the exact same amount, and produce wildly different sites because the quality of the output is a function of the quality of the creator’s instructions.
Your website reveals what you notice, what you value, what you find beautiful. It reveals whether you have an eye for detail or whether you’ll accept the first thing the machine spits out. In a world where AI handles execution, the ability to discern good from great becomes the key differentiator. Your personal website becomes a portfolio of your taste.
Take an example from a personal website like this one by an Antoine Wodniack.
Every element of his site communicates that this was built by a tasteful engineer, so even without the ‘Creative Developer’ tagline on the homepage, we already get a sense that his site is the digital living room of someone who’s just as creative as they’re technical.
But there’s another reason to build one I hadn’t considered.
Personal Sites as Owned Archives
I got to meet Nnamdi in person for the first time yesterday and I asked him why he chose to build his site versus keeping his profile and writing mostly on other sites.
He said that he decided he wanted to pool together all his writing work to a domain he owned. He wanted to maximize his digital autonomy while creating a more permanent record for the evolution of his thinking, as a lot of these publishing platforms come and go.
He was right. So much of my writing is littered all over the internet (some on platforms that are now defunct). My early WordPress days in high school gave way to LinkedIn and Medium around 2017, then Beehiiv and Substack around 2020. I’m only now starting to centrally archive all my published work to make them accessible in one place.
That’s the next build I’m focused on for my personal site, especially as my thinking on them evolves from ‘landing pages for successful people’ to ‘personal digital living rooms’ that lets people set their own rules for communicating their backgrounds, identities, tastes, and skills with the world.
In a world where the personal site field is increasingly standard in applications, you’ll eventually have to decide—personal site or blank box?
But the real question isn’t whether you can afford to build one, it’s whether you can afford what leaving that ‘personal website’ field blank does to your prospects as the job market becomes more competitive.
If you’d want to build one in an afternoon, even if just for fun, I’d recommend getting started with Claude Code, as it can help you whip one up with just $20 and a few focused hours. This tutorial by Nate Herk is a great place to get started.
Reading this newsletter on a Monday has me all pumped up for the week. I, myself, have been trying to build a personal website, but I was struggling with whether I wanted to make it a CV-like website, but I didn't want to box myself in too much just for employment, especially as a creative with multiple mediums. But I'll be definitely stealing the term 'digital living room,' and your website is in my mood board already. Well done!