AI is genuinely useful in website production, and it is useful in a narrower band than the marketing suggests. This is where it sits in my process.
Problem
Producing a website involves six phases with very different failure modes. Applying AI uniformly across all of them produces a site that demos well and fails in production.
My System
| Phase | AI involvement | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Research | High | Summarising competitors and extracting patterns is fast and cheap |
| Direction | None | This is the client’s positioning, not a generated artefact |
| Prototype | Medium | Layout options are useful; final composition is not |
| Build | Medium | Component scaffolding yes; architecture no |
| Testing | Low | It misses real-device and accessibility problems |
| Deployment | None | Deterministic steps should stay deterministic |
Workflow
- Research pass. Competitor teardown, content inventory and the constraint list, drafted with AI and then corrected by hand.
- Direction document. Written before any design tool is opened. One page: audience, promise, content structure, constraints.
- Prototype in Figma. AI-generated layout options are used as raw material, never as the deliverable.
- Build in a static generator. Components are hand-reviewed. Anything touching the content model is written by me.
- Test on real devices. Two phones, one tablet, keyboard-only navigation, and a Lighthouse run.
- Deploy. Nothing AI-assisted happens here.
Why It Works
Because the phases where judgement matters most are the phases where I use it least. Research is cheap to redo. Direction is not.
Limitations
AI-generated front-end code has three recurring faults: it uses a framework when none is needed, it produces inaccessible interactive components, and it ignores the content model entirely. All three are invisible in a screenshot and obvious in month three.
Improvements
I am testing a review checklist generated per project from the direction document, so that review is systematic rather than remembered. Early results are promising and not yet trustworthy.
