How AI migrated my abandoned website in one morning

Seven years of “I should upgrade this”

The last article on this blog was published in January 2019. Until this morning, the site was still running drupal 7, a version from 2018.

I always planned to upgrade. Drupal 7 reached end of life, the upgrade path to modern drupal is famously a migration, not an update, and every time I looked at it my estimate came back the same: a weekend, minimum. Probably two. Too much work. So the site sat there, quietly outdated, for seven and a half years.

Migrating an entire CMS is the final boss of boring tasks. This is exactly the kind of work I now hand to AI agents.

The plan came first

This morning I opened claude code in the project. My first request was not “migrate my site.” It was a plan. Five minutes of questions settled what matters: the articles stay exactly as they are, the new site is static, and nothing counts as done until it is verified. The plan turned into 9 small tasks. Each went to a fresh agent, and each agent came back with a report. Independent tasks ran in parallel. Nothing was committed without a review.

The core rebuild took the agents 37 minutes: all 12 articles migrated verbatim with their images and tags, redirects for all the old drupal URLs, 481 internal links checked with zero broken, and two missing publish dates recovered from the Wayback Machine. A few things went wrong along the way: a dead social link that a script reported as alive, a wrong guess about my location, a timezone bug that shifted article dates by one day. Every one of them was caught in review, not by luck. Small tasks, then check the work.

The part that matters: maintenance

The migration is a nice story, but the reason I am writing this is what happened after. The old site died because maintenance was too expensive for the value it produced. So the new setup makes maintenance almost free.

The site is now Astro: static files hosted on cloudflare pages, no database, no admin pages to patch, no web servers and hosting accounts, no JavaScript in the browser except the dark mode toggle. There is nothing to upgrade under time pressure ever again.

And the workflows themselves are automated. I created a claude code skill, a small instruction file that teaches the AI a repeatable procedure: it builds the site, runs a verification script that checks every page, every link and every redirect, and deploys to cloudflare pages only when everything passes. A red check never ships.

Was it worth it?

Seven and a half years of postponing, solved in one morning session. Not because AI is magic, but because the boring, careful, repetitive work is exactly what agents are good at, and the judgment calls stayed with me.

That’s it. Do you also have a site you keep postponing to upgrade? Drop me a line. I would love to hear what is holding it back.