I built my personal website in a weekend.
Cool story. Now let's talk about what it actually took.

Not long ago, building a personal website meant finding a developer, agreeing on a brief, going back and forth on design, waiting on revisions, and somewhere between six weeks and three months later, maybe having something live. Most people skipped the whole thing and just kept updating their LinkedIn.

I built mine in a weekend. I want to be honest about what that did and didn't mean, because I think the easy version of this story misses the part that actually matters.

What AI did

I used Claude as my primary collaborator throughout the build. I'd describe what I wanted, it would produce code, I'd push back, refine, redirect. It handled the HTML and CSS, helped me think through the structure, debugged errors when things broke, and kept a running understanding of decisions we'd made earlier in the process.

The speed was real. What would have taken weeks of back-and-forth with a developer, or months of me learning to code from scratch, compressed into a weekend of focused work. The distance between "I have an idea" and "this is live on the internet" has genuinely collapsed, and I don't think most people have registered how significant that is yet.

What I still had to do

Here's the part that gets left out of the hype: I made every single decision. The structure of the site, the sections, the copy, the tone, what to include and what to leave out. Every word on that page is mine. The design direction, the colour choices, the way I wanted it to feel: all of that came from me knowing what I was trying to communicate and to whom.

The technical execution was mine too. Setting up the GitHub repository, configuring Netlify for deployment, pointing my Cloudflare DNS settings to the right place, uploading files in the right folder structure, debugging when things didn't work. AI made each of those steps easier to understand and faster to work through, but I was the one doing them. Nobody clicked the buttons for me.

What this tells me about AI more broadly

I've been thinking about this a lot since the site went live. The people who are going to struggle with AI aren't the ones who can't use it. They're the ones who hand everything to it and wonder why the output feels hollow, or the ones who refuse to touch it and fall further behind on capability while the tools keep improving.

The skill, the real one, is knowing what to hand to a model and what to protect from it. The judgement calls, the taste, the point of view, the things that make your work distinctly yours: none of those get better by outsourcing them. They get better by using them.

I protected the writing on my site. I protected the decisions about what story I wanted to tell and how I wanted to tell it. I used AI for the parts that required technical knowledge I didn't have and didn't need to develop from scratch. That division felt right, and I think getting that division right is what separates people who use AI well from people who just use AI.

The part I didn't expect

After I posted about the launch on LinkedIn, a Senior Director of HR commented that it had challenged her to be more intentional about how she uses AI. That landed differently than I expected, not because it was flattering, but because it pointed at something I think is true: the conversation most of us are having about AI is still too abstract. We're talking about it as a concept, a threat, a revolution, rather than as a practical tool with real strengths and real limits that you learn by actually using it.

Build something. Break something. See where it helps and where it lets you down. That's the only way to form a view that's actually yours.

The bigger shift

Recruiters already Google you before they pick up the phone. We're moving toward a world where the standard ask shifts from "send me your CV" to "send me your link." A CV tells someone what you've done. A website shows them how you think, what you stand for, and whether you're someone worth a conversation.

If you've been putting that off because it felt too technical, too expensive, or too time-consuming, the barrier you were waiting to disappear has disappeared. The only thing between you and a personal website now is whether you're willing to spend a weekend on it.

That's worth sitting with.