Jekyll to Astro: an AI-assisted migration
TL;DR: I used AI tools to move my blog from Jekyll to Astro. Cursor helped me finish in about 3-4 hours (half the usual time), and I spent $10 testing out Aider. The site’s faster and easier to maintain now.
My Jekyll blog worked fine but felt a bit dated. I decided to switch to Astro after hearing good things about how it handles Markdown and builds pages quickly. Here’s what I started with:
I started with the Astro migration guide. It’s helpful but leaves a lot of details up to you. The community filled in some gaps with guides about migration trade-offs and URL structures. Still, it looked like a lot of manual work ahead.
The experience was frustrating. Aider kept asking to start the dev server, which blocked other input. I couldn’t guide it or course-correct beyond answering yes/no - I just watched it make decisions.
Even with the narrower scope, the automated approach required significant manual intervention. While it managed to update a few posts, I lost track of which files still needed changes and hit API throttling issues.
