Designed and built a full portfolio website from scratch through conversation with AI — with zero web development experience going in. You're looking at it.
Short Circuit needed a website — a place to show the work, host the newsletter archive, and give the whole project a real presence. I'd actually built a website once before, during a Computer Information Technology minor at the University of Oregon, but I was never great at coding. That was years ago, and web technology had moved on.
This time, instead of struggling through tutorials or paying a developer, I wanted to see how far I could get by building the entire site through conversation with AI. Not a template. Not a drag-and-drop builder. Real HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — written collaboratively with AI from a blank file.
Built a complete design system from scratch: custom CSS variables, a dark-mode color palette (deep navy, electric blue, circuit green), Space Grotesk + Inter + JetBrains Mono typography, and a responsive grid layout. The site includes scroll-triggered animations, a glassmorphism nav bar, and a bento-style project grid — all written through iterative prompting with AI.
Set up a full deployment pipeline: GitHub repository for version control, Vercel for continuous deployment (every push to main goes live automatically), Squarespace DNS pointing to the Vercel instance, and Google Workspace for professional email. The entire stack was configured through conversation — researching options, comparing tradeoffs, and executing the setup step by step.
You don't need to know how to code to build a real website. You need to know what you want and be willing to iterate. AI handled the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — I handled the vision and the decisions. The hardest part wasn't the code. It was learning to articulate what I wanted clearly enough that the AI could build it right the first time. That skill — translating vision into precise instructions — turned out to be more valuable than any programming language.
The most complex project in the portfolio — a multi-page site with a design system, deployment pipeline, and DNS configuration, all from a blank file. Scope expanded from "portfolio site" into home, about, projects, and newsletter pages, which made context loading harder and scope discipline looser than it should have been.
Strongest signals: feedback precision on visual design and a willingness to override AI suggestions when the vision was clearer than the recommendation. The gap to close is front-loading technical constraints — understanding what's possible before the first prompt would have cut rework cycles in half.