Date: 2023-02-08
I’ve been covering AI tools for months now — image generators, detection tools, avatars, the whole zoo. But this week I did something different: I used GPT as the actual engine to concept and build a full website. Not a demo. Not an experiment. A real site going live this week.
The site is TheAICoder.com. I’m going to walk you through exactly what I did, because “AI built my website” sounds either magical or useless depending on your mental model — and the reality is more useful than either.
What I Tried
I didn’t just ask GPT to “build me a website.” I ran it as a workflow — four distinct phases, each answer feeding the next question.
Phase one: Website copy. Not a rough draft. The actual headlines, section text, and calls to action for a coding education platform. I gave it the concept, it gave me publish-ready content.
Phase two: Feature planning. Instead of a whiteboard session, I asked GPT what features a service like this should include. The suggestions weren’t generic. They were specific, considered, and matched what a real coding education platform needs.
Phase three: Technical implementation. For each feature, I asked which WordPress plugins to use. So in one chain I went from “here’s the concept” to “here’s the feature set” to “here’s the tech stack.” No developer consulted.
Phase four — where I am right now — GPT is writing the actual lesson content. Full instructional modules. Structured and ready to publish.
Concept to near-launch: DAYS.
What Actually Worked
The prompt chaining. That’s the thing people don’t see when they first use ChatGPT.
Most people open it, ask a trivia question or have it write a poem, and conclude it’s clever but not useful. The real power isn’t in any single prompt — it’s in treating each answer as the foundation for the next question. It looks like this:
- “Write copy for a site that teaches AI-assisted coding” → content done
- “What features should a service like this include?” → feature list done
- “Best WordPress plugins for [specific feature]?” → tech stack done
- “Write a tutorial on [topic]” → lesson content done
Each step took minutes. The whole chain took an afternoon. That’s not faster — that’s a different category of speed entirely.
The other thing that worked: the planning layer. I wrote recently about considering a coding crash course, and I still think hands-on skills matter. But GPT has already taken over the layer ABOVE coding — the “what should I build and how should I structure it” phase. That’s where most people get paralyzed. Blank page, no direction, no roadmap. GPT demolishes that phase. You go from “I have an idea” to “here’s the plan” in hours, not weeks.
What Didn’t
Let me be straight: I’m still doing the WordPress assembly myself. Plugin installation, layout configuration, the inevitable friction of making everything fit together — that’s still manual work. GPT handed me a great shopping list. I still have to do the shopping.
There will be rough edges after launch. There always are. The content is solid, the structure is sound, but polish takes iteration. I’ll be tweaking things for weeks.
And GPT’s feature suggestions, while good, weren’t magic. I still had to evaluate them, make judgment calls, and decide what actually fits the service I’m building. It’s a fast, smart collaborator — not a decision-maker.
Who Should Care
If you’ve been sitting on a business idea and telling yourself you need to hire a developer, a copywriter, and a consultant before you can move — this is for you.
You might not need any of that for the prototype. The “where do I even start” tax just got dramatically cheaper. If you can describe what you want to build, you can get to a working concept faster than you think.
Developers: this doesn’t replace you for complex builds. But the early-stage planning work? Clients are going to show up with a lot more of it already done. That changes the conversation.
What This Signals
Here’s my read on what’s actually shifting: AI’s leverage isn’t in single outputs. It’s in compressing the early stages of building something — the messy, uncertain, “I have an idea but no map” phase.
That phase used to take weeks. Now it takes an afternoon.
I think this is where it gets REALLY interesting — not the image generators, not the novelty demos — but AI as the planning engine for people who want to build things. The gap between “I have an idea” and “I have a structure I can actually execute” just collapsed.
I’ll post a full update once the site is live. Until then — if you have an idea, just start the conversation. You might be surprised how far a good chain of questions gets you.
