Setting Up a Site With AI in One Sitting

I needed a professional site. Not a portfolio. Not a blog platform. A clean, single-page site that says who I am, what I know, and how to reach me. The kind of thing that used to take a freelancer two weeks and three rounds of revisions.

I built it in one sitting with Claude as my co-pilot.

The stack: Next.js, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, deployed on Vercel. I didn't choose these because I'm a frontend developer — I'm not. I chose them because they're what serious teams use, and I wanted something I could maintain and extend without hitting a ceiling six months from now.

Here's what surprised me about the process: the hard part wasn't the code. Claude handled the JSX, the Tailwind classes, the responsive breakpoints, the SEO metadata. The hard part was the same thing it's always been — knowing what you actually want.

I had to decide: what sections belong on the homepage? What's the visual hierarchy? What's the tone? Do I need a contact form or is a mailto link more honest? These are product decisions, not engineering decisions. And no AI can make them for you.

What AI can do is collapse the gap between deciding and shipping. I'd describe a section — "I need a hero area, cream background, headline on the left, small portrait on the right, a single CTA button" — and working code would appear. Not perfect on the first try, but close enough that iterating felt like editing a document, not debugging a system.

The GDPR compliance was a good example of where my enterprise IT background actually mattered. Cookie consent, analytics that only load after explicit consent, privacy policy, cookie policy, terms of service — I know what's required because I've been on the receiving end of compliance audits. Claude wrote the components. I knew what they needed to do.

A few things I'd tell other non-traditional builders attempting this:

• Start with the content, not the design. Write what you want to say before you think about how it looks. The words are the product.
• Don't over-engineer. A personal site doesn't need a CMS, a database, or authentication. Static generation is fine. Mailto links are fine.
• Ship early. I deployed to Vercel before the site was polished. Having a live URL changes how you think about what's left to do.
• Use the AI for what it's good at — syntax, patterns, boilerplate — and bring your own judgement for everything else.

Total time from blank project to live site with cookie consent, legal pages, and auto-deploy: one focused session. Not because AI is magic, but because I knew exactly what I wanted and AI removed the bottleneck of translating that into code.

Twenty-five years of enterprise IT taught me what a well-built system looks like. AI just gave me a faster way to build one.