I Built This Website With AI. Here's What Actually Happened.

Instagram will tell you it takes three skills and an afternoon.

It doesn't.

I built this website with AI — twice, actually — and I want to tell you what that was really like for someone who is a designer, not a developer. Not the highlight reel. The part where I sat in the dark, stabbing at things, waiting for something to work.

Where I started

Let me be precise about my starting point. I had opened the Terminal maybe twice in my life, and closed it quickly both times. I didn't know GitHub Desktop existed. I didn't know what a deploy was. I did not know AI models had names, let alone that choosing between them was a decision with a price tag.

What I had: twenty years of visual storytelling, a clear picture of the site I wanted, and the naive confidence of someone who'd watched too many "I built this in a weekend" videos.

Stabbing in the dark

Nobody tells you how much of this is trial and error. My repository still contains the fossils of everything I tried: skill packs with names like UI/UX Pro Max, Taste, Impeccable — five different "design taste" plugins from strangers on GitHub, installed in the hope that aesthetic judgment was something you could download. Folders named .impeccable and .agents sit in my project to this day, like tools left behind by a previous civilization.

Some of it helped. Most of it was me in a dark room, patting the walls for a light switch. Connectors that needed keys. Keys that needed rotating because I'd pasted them somewhere I shouldn't. Extensions, agents, hooks — each one a small vocabulary lesson I didn't know I'd signed up for.

The vocabulary tax

The real learning curve wasn't design or even code. It was the invisible plumbing between me and a live website: Vercel, Next.js, Turbopack — words that meant nothing to me and stood between me and everything.

Concrete examples, because vague complaints help no one. My logos vanished from the live site after every update — the cause was one line in a configuration file telling the system to ignore my images folder. A performance test once scored a login page instead of my website, because my testing link was pointing at a locked door. Another night I spent an hour convinced my fixes were making everything worse — the truth was that my bookmarked link was a frozen snapshot of an old version, because it turns out there are three different kinds of URL for the same website, and nobody tells you that either. My development server simply died one afternoon after a few hundred edits, and I diagnosed it the way I diagnose everything now: by asking.

None of these were disasters. All of them cost an evening. That's the tax.

The model maze

Here's the expensive lesson. When I started, I ran everything on Claude Opus — the most powerful, most costly model — for weeks, on tasks like renaming files. I didn't know there was a menu. When I finally tried Sonnet, the results were the same and the bill wasn't.

Then came Fable, and the difference wasn't speed — it was being questioned. Audited. Argued out of buying a font bundle I didn't need. But learning which intelligence fits which task took me months and real money, and that trial-and-error is the part no tutorial covers: the most important setting in the whole stack is the one nobody explains.

What the wasted time bought

Here's the turn I didn't expect. All that fumbling taught me the only skill that actually matters in this new way of working: knowing what to reject.

The AI built me a scroll effect where sections stacked like cards. Technically flawless. I killed it — it didn't feel like my studio. It built a cinematic wipe. Killed that too. The third version — one continuous atmosphere the whole site floats on — is the one you're scrolling right now. The machine executed all three; the taste I'd tried to download from GitHub turned out to be the one thing that was mine all along.

That's what the dark room teaches you. Not the tools — those change monthly. It teaches you what your own judgment sounds like when everything else is automated.

The honest verdict

If you're a non-developer: this will be harder and slower than anyone admits. Budget for frustration the way you budget for the subscription. You will waste evenings on plumbing. You will pay the vocabulary tax, and the model tax, in full.

And then — genuinely — the gap between what you can imagine and what you can ship gets smaller than it has ever been in the history of our craft. I have a website with hand-written WebGL and a hidden presentation mode, built without a developer on retainer, by a person who was afraid of the Terminal in April.

Close isn't zero. But I've stopped stabbing in the dark. Now I just work there, and the light comes on when I say so.

Disclosure, kept honest: an AI drafted this from the logs of our sessions, and I rewrote it until it sounded like the person who lived it.