I started this blog in 2017 because I believed something I still believe: you don’t really understand a thing until you’ve written it down for someone else.
Back then I was deep in data warehousing, data engineering and business intelligence — SQL Server, SSIS, SSAS, MDX, DAX. Writing those posts was how I learned. If I couldn’t explain filter context in a paragraph, I didn’t actually understand filter context.
Then I joined Google Cloud at the end of 2021, as a Customer Engineer supporting strategic AI accounts. And I became a mother at almost exactly the same time.
What happens to a blog when life gets loud
I don’t have a dramatic story about why the writing stopped. It stopped the way these things always stop: a new job with an enormous learning curve, a newborn, and a finite number of hours. Writing was the thing that could be deferred, so it got deferred. Then deferring became the default.
Between April 2022 and December 2025, I published exactly two things. One of them was a recipe for coconut jelly.
I thought about the site often. I even had ideas queued up — I found sixteen unfinished drafts sitting in the admin, the newest of them four years old. What I didn’t have was an afternoon to face the whole thing at once. And the longer it sat, the more the first step felt like archaeology rather than writing.
The thing that actually changed
Here’s what I want to be precise about, because I think it’s the part people get wrong about this moment in AI.
The shift is not that I can write code faster. I could always write code. The shift is that the activation energy for confronting accumulated mess dropped to almost nothing.
Three years ago, fixing this site was a project. It needed scoping, a free weekend, and the willingness to open a nine-year-old WordPress install and start pulling threads. I never scheduled it, because it was never the most important thing on any given Saturday. So it compounded.
This time I opened an agentic coding tool, pointed it at the live site and my local notes, and asked a genuinely lazy question: what would a stranger see?
That question used to be expensive to answer. Now it’s cheap. And when the diagnosis is cheap, you actually get the diagnosis.
A note on tools
I used Claude Code for this, for a fairly boring reason: I had trial credits sitting there and wanted to see what the newest models could actually do with a real, messy system.
Which tool I reached for hardly matters, though, and I’d rather this didn’t read as a recommendation. Google’s Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Cursor and others all do this now, and the gap between them is closing fast enough that whatever I named today would be wrong within a quarter. I work at Google Cloud; I use our tools daily and they’re good at exactly this class of work.
The category is what matters, not the brand. An agent that can read your actual systems, hold context across a long session, and take real actions is a different thing from a chatbot you paste snippets into. If your mental model of AI assistance is still “autocomplete,” you’re calibrated to 2023.
What it found
The first thing on my homepage was a post from 2017. I’d pinned it years ago and forgotten. It opened with “I am a IT girl who loves fitness” — grammatical error included — and described me as someone learning Business Intelligence. That was the first impression I’d been giving every visitor for four years.
Every social icon in my header was a placeholder. Four of them, pointing at platform homepages rather than my profiles. One was Google+, which shut down in 2019. Meanwhile LinkedIn — the link that actually mattered — wasn’t in the header at all.
Twenty of my forty-two posts were filed as “Uncategorized.” Including the most substantial thing I’d written in years.
My best post had a broken-looking URL. I’d put a rocket emoji in the title, which WordPress dutifully percent-encoded into the slug. Every time I shared that link, people saw a wall of %f0%9f%9a%80.
My tagline called me a “Data & AI enthusiast.” Enthusiast. I do this for a living.
And the domain I’d bought and put on my resume was configured as a redirect. It worked — it just bounced visitors to the old address, which contains my birth year. The URL I’d been handing to people quietly resolved to something else.
None of these are hard problems. That’s the point. They’re the kind of thing that’s invisible when you’re inside it and obvious the moment someone looks from outside.
The most useful thing it did was refuse
Here’s the part I didn’t expect.
I asked it to pull material from my working notes — the log where I translate my week into things I can point at during performance reviews. It read them and told me most of it couldn’t be published: named customers, internal system names, growth figures, a client’s confidential timeline.
It was right, and I hadn’t fully registered the risk. Those notes exist to help me argue for a promotion. They were never meant to be public. But “turn my notes into blog posts” is exactly the kind of instruction where the gap between what I said and what I meant could have cost me something real.
It also caught that my site was configured to auto-broadcast every new post to LinkedIn and Facebook — something I’d set up years ago and completely forgotten. I’d have discovered that by publishing four backdated posts and watching them all fire into my feed at once.
The lesson isn’t “AI is dangerous.” It’s that when you delegate, the quality of your guardrails matters more than the quality of the execution. Which is exactly what I’d say about delegating to people.
What I’d tell you if your site looks like mine did
- The gap is not the problem. Four years of silence cost me less than four years of a pinned 2017 post describing a version of me that no longer exists. Stale beats empty, but current beats both.
- Audit from the outside. Every item on that list was invisible to me and obvious to a fresh reader. You cannot see your own site.
- Your archive is an asset even when it’s dated. I nearly deleted the old BI posts. I’m glad I didn’t. The arc from DAX in 2017 to LLM applications in 2026 is the story — it shows the through-line, and the through-line is the point.
- Be specific about what’s off-limits before you start, not after.
The real shift
I want to be careful not to oversell any of this. No agent gave me something to say. It cleared the debris between me and saying it — which, it turns out, was the entire blocker.
The reason I hadn’t come back wasn’t that I had nothing to write. It was that returning meant confronting a hundred small broken things first, and that cost was high enough to keep losing to everything else in my week.
That cost has collapsed. Not just for blogs — for every neglected system you’ve been avoiding because the first step was too expensive to schedule. The backlog you’ve been carrying is probably smaller than it feels.
I still believe you don’t understand a thing until you’ve written it for someone else. I’d just forgotten that the same applies to the site itself.
Annie Xu 
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