Why I'm Building My Personal Site Entirely With AI
An experiment in using Claude Code and AI tools to scaffold, design, and ship a production website — and what it means for agencies.
BY MARCELO RUSSO
This site you're reading was built entirely by AI tools. Not "AI-assisted" in the way people usually mean — where a human writes most of it and ChatGPT fills in some copy. I mean the full stack: scaffold, architecture, content, AEO optimization, deployment. All of it.
Why Bother?
Two reasons. First, I genuinely wanted to see if current AI tools (specifically Claude Code) could produce something I'd actually ship. Not a demo. Not a prototype. A real site that represents me professionally.
Second, I run an agency that's increasingly powered by AI. If I'm going to tell clients that AI can produce production-quality work, I should be able to point to my own site as evidence.
What Worked
The technical scaffold was fast and correct. Next.js 15, App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind, structured data, AEO optimization — all generated in a single session. The AI understood the architecture decisions and made good defaults.
The structured data was actually better than what I'd typically write by hand. The Person schema, Organization schema, FAQ schema, Article schema — all properly linked with @id references. Most agencies skip this entirely or do it poorly.
What Required Human Judgment
Content voice. AI can write competent copy, but matching a specific person's voice requires iteration. I had to guide it toward my actual way of speaking — direct, slightly irreverent, occasionally mixing in Spanish.
Design decisions. The AI produced clean, functional design. But "clean and functional" is also "safe and forgettable." The interesting design choices — the ones that make a site feel like it belongs to a specific person — still need a human pushing for them.
What This Means for Agencies
AI isn't replacing agencies. It's changing what agencies spend their time on. The commodity parts of web development — scaffolding, boilerplate, structured data, basic content — those are now nearly free. What's left is the hard stuff: strategy, voice, design judgment, client relationships.
That's a good trade. The busy work was never the valuable part anyway.