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.
This was the most complex project in the portfolio — a full multi-page website with a design system, deployment pipeline, and DNS configuration, all built from a blank file. The scope expanded significantly from the original "portfolio site" pitch into home, about, projects, and newsletter pages, which made context loading harder and scope discipline looser than it needed to be.
Where Richie shines: feedback precision on visual design and a strong iteration instinct. He overrode my suggestions when his vision was better, and that confidence produced a more distinctive site than I would've built alone. The gap to close is front-loading technical constraints — understanding what's possible before the first prompt would've cut full rework sessions in half.