Building this site: Claude vs. doing it myself
This site is its own first comparison. The job: build a content site — design, copy, code, deployment — with one person and no engineering background. The two ways to do it: learn the stack myself, or run the work through an AI assistant and review everything it produced.
The conditions
Same job, same person, same weekend. The stack: Next.js (static export), a Markdown content pipeline, and Cloudflare Pages on the free tier. Total cash cost: the domain.
What the assistant did
The design went through seventeen numbered revisions — from three initial directions to the final version you are reading. Every revision was a reaction to one sentence of feedback ("too much", "calmer", "the rhyme is too long"). The code came out working; my job was taste, not syntax.
What I still had to do
- Decide. Every fork — name, domain, tone, layout — was mine.
- Verify. Domain availability, hosting terms, affiliate program rules.
- Own the accounts. GitHub, Cloudflare, the registrar.
The ledger
| Item | Doing it myself | With the assistant |
|---|---|---|
| Design iterations | weeks | 17 revisions in one session |
| Code written by me | all of it | none |
| Decisions made by me | all of them | still all of them |
| Cash cost | courses, time | the domain |
Verdict
The assistant takes the seat for build work. The decisions were never up for delegation — and that turns out to be the real division of labor: judgment stays, keystrokes go.