How I build websites with AI, and what I still check by hand

AI is a tool in the workflow, not the author

When I say I build custom websites, I mean it literally: every site I ship is its own Next.js codebase, designed for that business. When I say I use AI, I mean that too. AI coding assistants are part of how I work every day, the same way they are for most professional developers now.

The difference that matters to a client is who makes the decisions. AI can write a component in seconds. It can’t know that a bakery’s Friday pickup window changes in the slow season, or that a gutter company wants more copper jobs and fewer cleanings. That context comes from talking to the owner, and it shapes everything.

Where AI saves the most time

The biggest gains are in work that is necessary but repetitive:

• Turning a section design into clean, typed React components
• Generating dozens of service or location pages from one shared template and data file
• Writing structured data (JSON-LD) that matches what’s on each page
• Refactoring when a layout changes late in a project
• Reviewing code for accessibility and edge cases before I test it myself

What I still check by hand

Some things I never hand off, because getting them wrong costs the client money or trust:

• Every phone number, address, price and claim on the site, checked against the source
• Payment flows, end to end, in a sandbox before they go live
• How the site looks and feels on a real phone, not just a resized browser
• Accessibility: keyboard navigation, contrast and screen-reader labels, tested with axe-core and by hand
• Lighthouse and PageSpeed scores before launch
• Redirects from every old URL when replacing an existing site

An example: on-site Square checkout

For Blissri Bakeshoppe we built card checkout directly on the bakery’s own site using Square’s Web Payments SDK, with a small server that creates the order and payment. AI helped write the service quickly. The design decisions were ours: the server re-prices every item from the Square catalog instead of trusting the browser, and the order stops if anything can’t be priced. That rule is the kind of thing a person has to decide on purpose.

What this means if you hire me

You get a custom site, built and tested by the person you talk to, in less time than a fully hand-typed build would take. And you get a straight answer about how it was made.