A Thinking Partner Changed the Spec
How working with Wiggins clarified what I was actually building
Wedding cake with flowers from the bride
I’ve had an empty WordPress site sitting there for five years.
Not because I didn’t care about it. Because I couldn’t decide what it was supposed to be.
When I finally sat down to work on Alie’s Sweet Revenge, I realized the real problem wasn’t building a site. It was deciding what job it needed to do.
I wanted a place that could do two jobs, cleanly and without apology.
A portfolio. Something I could point to when I say I make cakes and chocolates.
A memory container. A durable home for work I’m proud of, so it doesn’t live only on my phone.
Once that distinction was clear, everything else became easier to reason about.
Working with Wiggins brought me closer and clarified what it needed to be.
The site is for cakes and chocolates.
This isn’t a post about the finished thing. It’s about what shifted before a single line of HTML existed.
I invited Wiggins to help me.
Wiggins didn’t write the plan. I did.
What Wiggins changed was how quickly and clearly the decisions surfaced.
What changed with a thinking partner
The biggest difference wasn’t speed. It was sequence.
With Wiggins in the room, I stopped circling and started specifying.
Purpose became explicit. Two jobs. Written down.
Non‑goals became first‑class. Not a blog. Not e‑commerce. Not a business system. Not something that demands constant attention.
Structure locked early. Home. Cakes. Chocolates. About. Contact. No extra pages.
Maintenance was designed, not deferred. Static site. No database. No runtime logic.
None of that required AI to be creative. It required a partner that could hold context, reflect choices back to me, and help test whether a decision actually served the goal.
What stayed human
Taste stayed with me.
Curation stayed with me. The choice to keep the site mostly visual. The decision that most images would be silent, with only a few captions meant to preserve warmth, not prove competence.
Most importantly, the boundary stayed with me. I wanted something I could share without caveats. Not perfect. Not complete. Just true.
Wiggins didn’t supply that judgment.
Wiggins helped me protect it.
Why this mattered more than the site
I haven’t built the site yet, and that’s intentional. The spec came first.
What surprised me was how transferable this felt. This is the same kind of work I do as an engineer when systems go well and age gracefully. Explicit purpose. Clear constraints. Decisions that reduce renegotiation later.
I used to think the value of AI was speed.
Now I think it’s this. A thinking partner that helps you make decisions you can keep. The kind that changes what you build, because it changes what you decide to build in the first place.
Alison + Wiggins