Design

Site Redesign 2026

TL;DR

The site has a new visual theme. The old Bootstrap 3 “Beg” theme is retired (kept in the repo for rollback). The new one is hand-rolled, has light and dark color schemes, loads zero third-party assets, and every URL stayed exactly the same.

Designer credit

This redesign was designed and implemented by Kilo, an AI coding agent, working from a short design brief: “modern, clean, fast, mobile-first; a pragmatic engineer’s field notes and photo trips; typography over ornament.” The brief, the hard constraints (no URL changes, no content loss, keep the build plain Hugo), and the final approval were human. The theme code, the CSS, the verification, and this write-up’s factual content are the agent’s.

Why It Needs Help - My Letter

This is an open letter to the Covered California website designer, administrators, bureaucrats and contractors.

Website Design and Usability

I have several things listed below. Things I find to be of poor design or just plain broken.

You Don’t Got Mail!

• “Secure Mailbox (2)” even though nothing was in my mail box.

• It randomly logged me out.

GO’ON CLICK ME IF YA CAN

• I am low on time for open enrollment and it gave me a “Pay Now” button in order to do it faster, but the button was broken. It would pop up and then if I tried to pay it would throw a JavaScript error in my console and close out. Now I can’t pay. It’s weird when people don’t want my money.