Personal websites are one of the few places online where you can decide what to show and how to show it. Templates made perfect sense when building something custom meant learning CSS, fighting layouts, and losing an entire weekend to one broken margin. They are still a good choice if your goal is simply to publish writing. There is no virtue in rebuilding a publishing system when you could be writing.
But if you are already making a personal site, the cost of making it unusual has dropped. An AI coding agent can help turn a strange idea into a working feature quickly. It cannot decide whether the feature belongs, whether it is useful, or whether future-you will resent it. That judgment is still yours. Future-you is a difficult stakeholder and has a very good memory.
My own site has components that would never appear in a generic portfolio template. Some are useful. Some exist because I wanted to see if I could make them work, and because it was easy to do. It took me only minutes to setup upstash voting backend for a post, and I may only ever use it once. The writing is personal, the projects are personal, and the site should not feel like a neutral container assembled for somebody else.
AI makes competent default output easier to produce, which makes personal choices more valuable. Start with a template if it helps you move. Use the tools for the boring parts. Then change the layout, add the oddly specific detail, and remove whatever does not feel like you. A personal site does not need to be elaborate. It just needs to belong to its author.