The Shoemaker’s Kid, Barefoot for 12 Years
Dozens of client sites. That’s the count.
Designing, coding, standing up servers, shipping. Twelve years of making a living from it. And every business card exchange ended the same way: “Do you have a website?”
“Sorry — we don’t have a company site yet.”
A web professional with no web presence. The shoemaker’s kid running barefoot. It’s a stock joke in the industry, but after twelve years of telling it about myself, the joke stops being funny.
The reason was simple. Client work first. Our own site, “when there’s time.” The time never came. Not for twelve years.
So Build It With AI
In 2026, I had AI agent teams in production.
It hit me: the same quality I deliver to clients, I could now deliver to myself in a single day.
Outsourcing was an option. But after twelve years of telling clients “this part needs more,” I did not trust myself to hand the work off and stay quiet.
Half experiment, half pride, I decided to build it myself.
Brutalism — Chosen for AI Reasons
I went with brutalism. Strip the ornament, let typography and contrast carry the weight.
I didn’t pick it because it’s fashionable. I picked it because it is the most compatible style for building solo with AI.
- No image assets required. Zero time spent hunting stock photos.
- Components are simple. The accuracy of AI-generated code jumps.
- The copy carries the page. Decoration doesn’t get in the way.
Brutalism wasn’t a design preference. It was the conclusion you reach when you reverse-engineer your production constraints. The constraint chose the style.
Three fonts only. Anton for display, IBM Plex Mono for English body, Noto Sans JP for Japanese. The accent color randomizes on every page load — five colors selected by JavaScript, with the logo recoloring in sync.
A small piece of play, plus the brand experience of “showing a different face every time.” Brutalism reads as cold, but I didn’t want a cold site.
Tech Stack Took 3 Seconds
Astro plus Tailwind CSS v4 plus Cloudflare Pages. There was nothing to debate.
Astro is built for static site generation. A corporate site has no business being an SPA. Spit out HTML and be done. Content Collections handle the blog directly from Markdown.
Tailwind CSS v4 went CSS-first and dropped the config file. Design tokens live inside CSS via the @theme directive. The setup speed is in another league.
Cloudflare Pages auto-deploys on git push. Free CDN. There was no reason to pick anything else.
Morning and Afternoon, That Was It
Morning:
- Sitemap and page structure — decided with AI
- Design system — colors, fonts, spacing — defined in CSS
- Layout, Header, Footer, SEO components — generated
- Top page — built
Afternoon:
- Seven sub-pages — built in one pass
- Bilingual switching (i18n) — implemented
- Blog — added
- Deploy and domain — configured
AI handled the coding and structure. I handled concept, copy, and direction.
The pivotal move was defining the design system strictly up front. With fonts, spacing, and color rules sitting inside CSS variables, AI could generate components that obey those rules at scale. Loose rules produce inconsistent pages.
This is the thing I have been telling clients for twelve years: define the rules first.
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Total pages | 20 (10 each, JA + EN) |
| Build time | 1 day |
| Engineers | 0 |
| Designers | 0 |
| Hosting cost | $0/month |
| Lighthouse Performance | 95+ |
What I Couldn’t Hand Off
It is not a magic wand. The honest list:
Copywriting did not fully delegate. To reproduce ANDOOR’s voice — declarative, short sentences, grounded in lived experience — a human had to write the seed. AI can write “something that sounds about right.” It cannot write “the voice of this company.”
Images stayed manual. The logo and OG images were built in Figma. Text-based AI does not solve that.
Responsive fine-tuning needed eyes. AI handled the broad strokes, but anything below 768 px required hand work.
Underneath “built in a day” sits “twelve years of judgment.” Defining the design system, choosing the granularity of components — those calls are only possible because of the production experience behind them.
The Shoes Got Made
Twelve years of being the barefoot shoemaker’s kid. The shoes finally got made. In one day.
This is not a story about how amazing AI is. It is the result of someone with a decade-plus of web production using AI correctly as a tool. Without the experience, you do not even know what to ask AI to do.
The flip side: with the experience, you no longer need a team to ship a production-grade site in a day.
Twelve years of “later” cleared in half a day. The other half went to drafting the first blog post. On the same day the shoes got made, I was already running.