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I Built This Website with AI in One Session

2025-02-20·5 min read

Key takeaway

AI doesn't replace taste or decisions. It compresses the time between decisions, which is where most development time actually goes.

I Built This Website with AI in One Session

This website — the one you're reading right now — was built in a single session. Design system, components, 7 pages, MDX blog with frontmatter parsing, scroll animations, typewriter effects. All of it.

Not over a weekend. In one sitting.

The bottleneck was never typing. It was deciding. AI compresses everything in between.

What I Mean by "Built with AI"

I didn't paste "make me a website" into a chat window and copy the output. That's not how this works, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Here's what actually happened:

  1. I designed the system. Color palette, typography choices, component architecture, page structure, content strategy. These are taste decisions that AI can't make for you.

  2. I described what I wanted in detail. A plan document with specific tokens, fonts, file structure, page layouts, and component behavior. The more precise the brief, the better the output.

  3. AI wrote the implementation. Components, pages, CSS, data layer, MDX integration. The code that turns decisions into pixels.

  4. I iterated. Adjusted colors, tweaked layouts, changed the font (twice), added features, removed things that felt wrong. This is the part that makes it yours.

The Leverage Is Real

What would have taken me a weekend of focused coding — boilerplate, config files, Tailwind setup, component scaffolding, responsive tweaks — took minutes. That's not an exaggeration. It's just what happens when the mechanical parts of development get compressed.

The result isn't a template. It's a custom site with my design decisions, my content, my weird terminal-aesthetic personality baked in. AI didn't make the creative choices. It executed them fast enough that I could make more creative choices in the same amount of time.

What AI Is Bad At (In This Context)

  • Font selection. I'm still not 100% happy with the heading font. AI can suggest options all day, but typographic taste is deeply personal and contextual.
  • Knowing when to stop. I had to actively resist the urge to keep adding features. AI makes it so easy to build that scope creep becomes the default.
  • Voice and tone. The blog content is mine. AI can structure and scaffold, but the difference between generic and personal is the specific stories, opinions, and phrasing that only come from lived experience.

What This Changes

The old model: spend 80% of your time on implementation, 20% on design decisions.

The new model: spend 80% of your time on design decisions, 20% waiting for implementation.

That inversion is profound. It means the most valuable skill for a developer is no longer "can you code this?" — it's "do you know what to build and why?"

Taste, judgment, and clarity of vision become the bottleneck. And honestly? That's a much better bottleneck to have.

The Meta Point

I'm writing about building this site on the site I built. That's a little recursive, I know. But it's also the point: the gap between "I should make a website" and "here's my website with a blog post about making it" has collapsed.

If you're a builder sitting on ideas because "I don't have time to make a site" — you do. The tools are here. The only thing left is deciding what you want to say.