Building a website by feel with AI

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been dabbling in what the geeks in San Francisco call ‘vibe coding’. That is to say, I’ve been building myself a brand new website simply by chatting to an AI. I’ve not written a single line of code, but I now have a fully functional website—the one you’re reading now.

Apart from setting up an account with GitHub (to manage the code that the AI generated), and with Vercel (to host the website), all I’ve done is interact with an AI to develop what you’re looking at here. It sounds ridiculous. But it worked.

Here’s what I actually did. I started out simply chatting with ChatGPT (Plus account). I followed its instructions to get the basic setup in place: Notion for the posts and pages, Node.js for the code language, GitHub for managing the code, and Vercel for hosting the site. Then I told ChatGPT what I wanted the site to be like, and I went from there—initially pasting the code it generated myself into a Mac app called Terminal.

After getting the foundations in place, I moved over to Codex. This is a dedicated coding app from OpenAI (the team behind ChatGPT, too). Once I got it connected to GitHub, I then didn’t need to do anything with the code. I would chat with Codex about the next part of the site I wanted to work on, and it would push the changes for me. It was remarkable.

The way Codex seemed to understand what I was asking for was incredible. Far from perfect, but incredible all the same. There was a lot of iteration, though. And it reminded me just how much of a perfectionist I can be!

I’m sure there are quicker ways to get up and running with a personal website. I’m still a big fan of Squarespace. But in all the years of having my own site, this is the first time I feel like I have something that is truly mine. Over the years, I’ve dabbled in code editing with various WordPress sites, but this new era of AI has empowered me to go to another level in tinkering.

It’s been such a fun process, too. Somehow I’ve felt like both a designer and a developer, pulling off both roles thanks to Codex. So much of this, though, is all about feel, like sanding a rough edge until it’s right. There were multiple instances where what Codex gave me at first technically met what I’d asked for, but it didn’t feel right. So it’d be draft after draft, iteration after iteration. Little by little, I felt my way forward. Previously, developing like this would have been much too expensive. The AI factor opens the door for people like me to do what could never be done before. I’ve loved the whole process.