I built a website with AI

I was promised a website in ten minutes, no coding required. The homepage did, in fact, come together in an afternoon. What came after, from the domain to the legal pages, took me a good deal longer, and that's what this piece is about.

You've seen it. A video with a shocked-face thumbnail, a title along the lines of "build your website with AI in minutes, no coding" and, a few minutes in, a gorgeous homepage on screen: background photo, a slogan, three cards with icons and a "contact us" button. End of video.

What they show is true: that homepage does come out. What they don't show is what happens when you want someone other than you to see it, when you want it to receive messages, comply with the law and still work six months from now.

So I took the promise literally: I build the site exactly as advertised, and I also tell you what happens when you want to publish it for real. So this doesn't stay theoretical, the site exists and you can see it here: iarealcases.com.

The site was this very one, AI Real Cases: a simple blog to keep track of what I learn, with a homepage, a list of articles, a page for each article, an "About the project" page and a contact form. It starts from markdown files, but it isn't just a static site: it has search, comments and a newsletter.

To build a website with AI there are, broadly speaking, three routes. The website builder with AI built in: the easiest, but your site lives inside their platform and by their rules. The chat, like ChatGPT or Claude: it gives you the code, but you have to know where to put it. And the coding assistant, which creates the whole project on your computer: more control, a bit more of a learning curve.

I went with the third, using Claude Code, Anthropic's coding assistant: a Claude that works directly on the files on your computer, creating them, changing them and running commands. I work mostly with Claude and was already using it for other things, so it was the natural choice.

My starting level, no embellishment: I'd touched HTML many years ago and knew what a server was because I have a few, but I had never built a modern website from scratch.

The first request was one paragraph, the way I'd explain it to a friend. Roughly this: "I want a simple, fast blog to share real cases of using artificial intelligence. A homepage with the latest articles, a page for each article, an "About the project" page and contact. Sober style, easy to read on a phone, no frills. I write the articles in markdown and I want the site generated from those files".

The first version arrived in about twenty minutes, and I had it running on my computer in under an hour, including the time I spent staring at it in awe. It had a homepage, an article template, a menu, a footer and a pretty decent mobile layout.

I have a confession to make here. For quite a while I did vibe coding, which is programming by talking to the AI: you tell it what you want in plain language, it writes the code, you try it and ask for changes, barely reading what it generates. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy, one of the founders of OpenAI, in early 2025. And yes, I got carried away. "Make the title bigger." "Now put the menu on the right." "Make dark mode switch on by itself."

What pleasantly surprised me was the care it took over details I hadn't asked for: readable typography, sensible margins, a font size that doesn't make you zoom on a phone, and a 404 error page with a friendly message.

If the story ended here, the ten-minute video would be right. But it doesn't end here.

The stumbles started as soon as I began asking for specific things.

The first: I asked for the articles to be sorted by date and it sorted them by file name; since my files start with a number, it looked like it worked, until I published one with an earlier date and it showed up first. The second, the classic: fixing the mobile menu broke the desktop one, and fixing the desktop one broke the mobile one again; three rounds until I asked it to explain why it kept happening. The third: the article images, which showed up locally and vanished when the site was generated because of a path problem; I asked three times in different words.

All in all, this phase ate up about six hours spread over three afternoons. Far more than the first version.

The practical lesson is simple, though it took me a while to learn: ask in pieces, one change at a time; check each change before asking for the next; and keep versions so you can go back. For that last one I use version control, which is a history of the project where every change is saved and can be undone. The day I started using it seriously, I stopped being afraid to ask for things.

A security warning, without the drama. Vibe coding can slip in things that shouldn't be there, like passwords or access keys written right into the code. It happened to me on this very site: the key for the form's email service ended up written in plain sight in the code, and I didn't find out until, with the site already live, I asked Claude for a security review. It's a real risk, and the reason I now do read anything that touches keys, email and forms.

Having the site on your computer isn't the same as having it published. It sounds obvious, and yet it's where most people get stuck.

Three words worth being clear on. The domain is the address, what people type into the browser. Hosting is the computer where the site lives, always on and connected to the internet. And deployment is the act of moving your site from your home computer to that host, every time you change something.

My choices: I registered the domain with one of the usual European registrars. The hosting is one of my VPSs, which I already had running for other things; a VPS is a slice of a big server that you rent. And deployment is handled by a small script that generates the site and uploads the files with a single command, which, of course, Claude Code wrote at my request.

Where I got stuck: on the security certificate, the padlock in the browser; the site loaded, but the browser warned that it wasn't secure, and it took me a whole afternoon to understand that the problem was in how the domain pointed to the server.

Can you build a website with AI for free? You can start for free. There are free plans for the assistants and free hosting for simple sites, especially if you accept an address like yoursite.platform.com. But your own domain costs money, however little, and time isn't free for anyone.

The contact form looks like the dumbest part of a website. It isn't. You have to decide where the messages go, how they're sent without leaving your email password in plain sight, and what to do about spam, which arrives before the first real message does. I solved it with a service that receives the form and forwards it to my email, and tested it by sending myself a dozen messages from my phone and from another computer. What I didn't do was ask for any protection against bots, and the assistant didn't add any on its own. By the third day after publishing, the first spam messages were already coming in.

Then come cookies, the legal notice, the privacy policy and GDPR, the European data protection regulation. I had to add a legal notice, a privacy policy, a cookie policy and a consent checkbox on the form. I got the information from the Spanish Data Protection Agency's guides and by comparing texts from similar sites; I'm in Spain, so the legal examples here are Spanish. I won't give you legal advice because I'm in no position to; what I know about this I cover in Is what I do with AI legal?.

One thing I will tell you: the tool helped me draft those texts, but the responsibility is mine. If the text is wrong, I'm the one who answers for it, not the assistant.

So I don't lose the site if something breaks, the whole project is under version control with a copy on another server, and the VPS has an automatic daily backup. Maintaining it takes me one or two hours a month: updates, checking the form, the odd fix.

The funny part comes when you want to change something months later. You no longer remember how it was built, because you never fully knew in the first place. This is where vibe coding sends you the bill: you have to ask the assistant to explain your own website to you. The problems that came after publishing I cover in Where the blows came from when I published the site.

What's true in the promise: the design and the code come out fast, very fast. What's hot air: everything else. The pretty part was one hour out of sixteen.

One line for each profile. If you're a small business owner with nobody technical, you can get the first version out on your own, but to publish it and get the legal side right you'd do well to ask for help. If you're an SME manager, use it to prototype and show what you want; don't mistake it for having the site ready. If you're a developer starting out, it's a huge accelerator, as long as you read what it generates.

My recommendation to get started: something small, in a test folder. A site it doesn't matter if you break.