Welcome to the new Fenix Art Lab.
This site is my own place on the internet. From today, it is the home of my projects, my work and my ideas. It has a new design, a new way of building, and a simple purpose: to show what I make and why I make it.
What is Fenix Art Lab?
I have run Fenix Art Lab since 2012. It is my personal studio, for anything at the intersection of engineering, design, arts and management.
Over the years it has had many versions. They showed my portfolio, graphic design, photography and travels, and posts about whatever I was building at the time. Every few years the site changed, and sometimes it went offline for a while. This version is the one that I intend to keep.
Why now?
I have wanted to relaunch the site since COVID. I bought themes, made designs, and built a new site behind a coming soon page. But it never reached the finish line.
Two things kept it there. The first was friction: every small change in WordPress took a plugin, a setting or a whole evening. The second, and the bigger one, was perfectionism. I believed that the site had to be very good before anyone could see it.
This year, two things changed.
The first is PlanetPassport, a travel app I have been building. I want to launch it properly, and that means that I need a clean online presence that I control.
The second is AI. It changed how I build, and it removed most of the friction.
How I built it
I have tried to keep up with AI tools since before ChatGPT. My real turning point came when I installed Claude Code and started to build with it.
My background is in mechanical engineering and project management, not software. Suddenly I had something like an extremely competent coding colleague, available at any hour, who could turn an idea into a working page while the idea was still fresh.
So I made a decision: no more WordPress. This site is built with AI, on a simple, modern stack that I can change in minutes, not evenings.
The speed is hard to describe. I say "the gap after the first section looks strange", and a few minutes later it is fixed. I say "the footer feels out of place", and we redesign it on the spot. When changes are this cheap, a page does not have to be perfect on day one. That alone took care of most of my perfectionism.
It feels like a superpower. I am now convinced that the capability of an individual is limited mostly by imagination.
It is not magic
AI does not mean that you click your heels and a website appears. There is a lot of trial and error, and there is a steep learning curve. Most of the work is still deciding what you want, seeing what is wrong, and saying so clearly.
Give two people the same AI tools for the same amount of time, and you will get very different results. The difference is not the model. It is the context, the skills and the system that each person sets up around it.
I have spent more than a year and a half developing my own agentic system: the instructions, the reference material and the workflows that let the AI do useful work for me. Even with a good system, the result comes from diligent iteration. This site went through many rounds before you saw it.
Should you have a website too?
My answer is yes, absolutely.
More and more of the internet is now read, summarized and repeated by AI agents. When someone asks about you, an agent will put together an answer from whatever it can find. I think it is up to each of us to shape that answer.
A personal website is the one place where you decide. You can make it as personal or as impersonal as you want. You can put whatever you choose on the platform: your work, your projects, your ideas or your photos.
When you do not tell your story, you simply let others make it up for you.
Live, not perfect
For years, I waited for the site to be ready. I know now that a site is never ready. It only gets better when people can see it.
The site is not perfect. That is the point. It is live, it is mine, and it will keep getting better.
To see what the studio makes next, follow it on Instagram at @fenixartlab. You can always reach me at hello@fenixartlab.ca.