Building this website with AI? Of course I did!

How to get the word out? Let’s start simple with a website. We can build off this.

We can of course build a site out of GitHub Pages, WordPress, S3 static hosting, or even a full-stack self-hosted environment… I even thought of just running it off a Raspberry Pi, but I don’t want to deal with a home firewall. I definitely don’t want to deal with authentication, profiles, or SEO. We’re starting with families and friends so the audience is sympathetic.

Well of course I asked another AI.

Hugo (for the static site generator) and Cloudflare.

I’ve worked with static site generators before. Simple concept. But if you only use them every 2-3 years, you need to play with them again to figure out their nuances, determine required frontmatter, proper syntax, etc. It’s a hassle.

Claude Desktop, using a MCP server followed my normal english directions really well. “Add 3 menus at top, put the image in the upper left…”. Had to handcode the remaining 5% but it was simple.

Cloudflare was a hassle but perplexity helped with that. Using screenshots is really helpful.

20 min and site ready. Not bad!