I'm actually building my personal branding site that will launch soon next week (hopefully).
I experimented my complex prompt across coding tools bolt, loveable, v0 and replit. And finally I almost got what I wanted on Bolt.
Then I exported the code to Cursor and continue from there.
I think in prompting with AI coding agents is like hit or miss scenario, but my lessons are we need to be more specific in describing what we want. It's not like chatting with ChatGPT where we can improve along the way. With AI coding agent, we need to prepare heavily from the start if it's possible.
It’s been a hit-or-miss experience for me too, and I’ve definitely had moments where too many AI iterations made things worse, not better. So glad to know I’m not alone in feeling that.
Now that I’m building my site, I’m realizing how tough the soft, personalized details really are. Writing those tiny descriptions are way harder than shipping features.
Can’t wait to see your personal site when it’s live, I know I’ll learn a lot from it!
Loved this breakdown, Jenny! Especially how the act of building surfaced what you actually want to offer. I’ve been through a few of those “AI-generated services I’m not ready to commit to” moments myself.
I knew you’d feel the same, thank you, Daria! This is exactly where I’ve come to appreciate AI not just as a tool builder, but as a thinking partner. It surfaces things we didn’t even know we needed to confront.
😂 thank you! Figured I’d finally upgrade to a professional one of my face since I was offered some headshots for free. Never did that before out of uniform. I will 100% be going to you when the need arrives one day!
This is very insightful - thank you for this breakdown. I have created some templates with Replit and also found the output a bit blunt, your post gives me inspiration to try more approaches and tools.
Inspiring and thorough in sharing your process and all the weird little gotchas along the way!
Plus, the cross-eyed profile pic in the image reminds us a lot of the limitations that AI likes to throw at us.
I'll have to play around with this idea. One of the first things I realized a few years ago was that I needed to reserve my domain name in in case I wanted to actually get it going in the future. A ".com, .org, and .co" domain is pretty cheap to reserve for a long-term bet.
You know what's funny? Earlier today I was taking advantage of Lovable to build another version of my personal site. And now I opened Substack and find this post 😅
Building a personal site for people like us that do different things and several skills and interests it's quite a challenge. Good thing that these non-coding platforms help us prototype first versions quickly.
I have remade my personal site twice (once when I was a full time dev, then when I was a freelance writer). And every time I wanted to create a new version I would procrastinate and get bogged with little details.
Your new site looks really top level! I liked the version of Bolt and Lovable. Although that last one is deff the best one of the 4 options.
Love it! Hope your Lovable building experience was smooth and fun!
I tried to capitalize on it too, but the pages kept getting stuck. And funny enough, Gemini couldn’t generate anything visible for me this weekend. Claude, on the other hand, was the most reliable. I guess when platforms get stress-tested, the differences really show!
Also… wait, did you mean you're now neither a full-time dev nor a writer? What are you up to anyway? So mysterious 😄
And thank you so much for the kind words! I’ve definitely still got a lot of refining to do, both in the wording and the content itself. Always a work in progress...
Agreed. It's always a work in progress much like I think we are haha.
I spent a good chunk of my Saturday night (and super early Sunday morning) prompting projects into existence. I loved that for the first time I wasn't paying attention to tech stacks but making progress on things that have been dead in the water for months.
In my testing, Claude fully delivered (as expected). Gemini did a great job on the visual and UX side but got stuck trying to make it functional. And whatever GPT model they had was pretty lackluster. Had some good ideas here and there but contradicted itself or challenged what I prompted. The only positive side was the speed of generations.
And yes... I'm not neither a (mostly) full-time dev nor a writer. I don't have a label yet to use. 😅 Between growing my publication. Working with people for Bolt's hackathon, training AI models as a gig, and doing field work🏕️ This month's been pretty eventful.
Thanks a lot for this overview. My personal website identity is different from my Substack, but I am in the midst of updating it and will definitely be applying some of this wisdom. I particularly loved the high/medium/low commitment idea for the contact form.
“This hybrid workflow gave me the best of both worlds: rapid prototyping with AI, and meaningful customization with human intent.”
I also really appreciated you shouting this out. This is more or less how I use gen AI in my marketing work and it’s a reminder that the best applications of AI are human-centered.
Thank you for this kind and thoughtful note, it means a lot!
And yes, I totally relate to navigating the differences between personal brand spaces (website vs. Substack). I think it’s so brilliant that you’re intentionally updating with clarity—there’s something grounding about aligning identity across platforms.
Thank you for the breakdown Jenny. I hadn’t heard of some of these tools before. Haven’t tried creating websites with them either. But i have seen folks use Manus to autonomously build websites which definitely won’t be as customizable but very hands off.
Yes, Manus is definitely one of the more autonomous builders, great if you want something quick and hands-off.
I’ve found that while each tool has its own vibe, the quality is pretty similar. A few minutes of testing usually makes it clear which one clicks for you.
Yeah i think the brand’s vibe and ux are what will differentiate them all. Probably all of them work on the top of the same/similar APIs otherwise. I am gonna try Cursor. From the outset it feels like a great add on to Claude which i currently use for creating python scripts!
If even a lame-o guy like me can generate an awesome looking website with v0 in 1 hour, anyone can.
Otherwise I cannot center a div even if my life depends on it.
For a static website that gets automatically updated, you could hack something together with Github Pages. Might not be able to trigger automatically when you post on Substack (unless you can somehow use a webhook), but if you trigger a Github Action, it could rebuild the website, push it to a gh-pages branch and publish it. Shouldn‘t be difficult, albeit a bit hacky.
I once built a status page for a backend service that worked purely with Github Pages. It displayed incidents and statuses based on created Github Issues.
Yeah, I also do github pages for personal static website hosting and use github actions to pull my latest posts from substack periodically. Basically, just took several rounds of prompts with Claude code to setup all.
That’s a fantastic strategy! Now I’ve got to dig into GitHub Actions, it sounds more powerful than it first appears, and possibly even comparable to other automation tools in some cases. Thanks for sharing your experience :)
Wow, thanks for sharing your experience, Nikola! Website generation really is wild right now. And honestly, I don’t think you’re a lame-o guy at all, you’re super technical and experienced!
The GitHub Pages setup you described is such a clever solution. Definitely more advanced than what I’m doing at the moment.
I’ve been leaning into laziness right now, I just update the code, push it to GitHub, and let Vercel handle all the deployment and updates for me. It’s not fancy, but it works :)
I also used Cursor to build my company's homepage. I used Figma Make to build my personal homepage. It was very troublesome to modify it before. Because I am not very good at front-end code.
Your sharing is very detailed, I will continue to improve my project and Bolg page. Thanks.
Love this experiment Jenny!
I'm actually building my personal branding site that will launch soon next week (hopefully).
I experimented my complex prompt across coding tools bolt, loveable, v0 and replit. And finally I almost got what I wanted on Bolt.
Then I exported the code to Cursor and continue from there.
I think in prompting with AI coding agents is like hit or miss scenario, but my lessons are we need to be more specific in describing what we want. It's not like chatting with ChatGPT where we can improve along the way. With AI coding agent, we need to prepare heavily from the start if it's possible.
Otherwise, the back and forth is tiring!
Totally agree with you on this, Wyndo!
It’s been a hit-or-miss experience for me too, and I’ve definitely had moments where too many AI iterations made things worse, not better. So glad to know I’m not alone in feeling that.
Now that I’m building my site, I’m realizing how tough the soft, personalized details really are. Writing those tiny descriptions are way harder than shipping features.
Can’t wait to see your personal site when it’s live, I know I’ll learn a lot from it!
Haha glad feeling same way!
Yes copywriting and details are way harder now than building the site. It requires rigorous and clear thinking about what to add and remove.
Spent so much time back and forth with this on Claude and Cursor.
Will share it with you :)
Yes, this hits right at what we’ve been talking about - treating AI as a thinking partner :)
Looking forward to you share!
Loved this breakdown, Jenny! Especially how the act of building surfaced what you actually want to offer. I’ve been through a few of those “AI-generated services I’m not ready to commit to” moments myself.
I knew you’d feel the same, thank you, Daria! This is exactly where I’ve come to appreciate AI not just as a tool builder, but as a thinking partner. It surfaces things we didn’t even know we needed to confront.
Beautiful breakdown, totally excited to replicate this process and see what I can discover about myself 🥳 Thanks for putting this guide together!
Glad to hear you are trying it 🙌 Let me know how it goes!
I definitely will, Jenny! 🤗
Who am I and what have I built? Such important questions to ask yourself. Great post, Jenny!
Thanks Joel! They are definitely hard questions and just starting to realize them.
Practical deep dives that anyone interested can find useful. You make a complicated space seem easy while being honest where it isn’t. Love it
Thanks so much, Kyle! Hope it comes in handy when that need arrives for you :)
Also, nice new profile pic! I had a moment of “wait… do I know this person”.
😂 thank you! Figured I’d finally upgrade to a professional one of my face since I was offered some headshots for free. Never did that before out of uniform. I will 100% be going to you when the need arrives one day!
This is very insightful - thank you for this breakdown. I have created some templates with Replit and also found the output a bit blunt, your post gives me inspiration to try more approaches and tools.
Thanks Elina!
Glad you found something useful out of the post.
Inspiring and thorough in sharing your process and all the weird little gotchas along the way!
Plus, the cross-eyed profile pic in the image reminds us a lot of the limitations that AI likes to throw at us.
I'll have to play around with this idea. One of the first things I realized a few years ago was that I needed to reserve my domain name in in case I wanted to actually get it going in the future. A ".com, .org, and .co" domain is pretty cheap to reserve for a long-term bet.
Thanks a lot!
Thanks so much! Totally, those weird little gotchas pop up for everyone in different ways.
The cross-eyed pic was such a perfect AI fail, I had to keep it 😂
And yes, grabbing those domains early is a smart move, low cost, high option value. Definitely let me know if you have something up and running!
This is such a great post!
You know what's funny? Earlier today I was taking advantage of Lovable to build another version of my personal site. And now I opened Substack and find this post 😅
Building a personal site for people like us that do different things and several skills and interests it's quite a challenge. Good thing that these non-coding platforms help us prototype first versions quickly.
I have remade my personal site twice (once when I was a full time dev, then when I was a freelance writer). And every time I wanted to create a new version I would procrastinate and get bogged with little details.
Your new site looks really top level! I liked the version of Bolt and Lovable. Although that last one is deff the best one of the 4 options.
Love it! Hope your Lovable building experience was smooth and fun!
I tried to capitalize on it too, but the pages kept getting stuck. And funny enough, Gemini couldn’t generate anything visible for me this weekend. Claude, on the other hand, was the most reliable. I guess when platforms get stress-tested, the differences really show!
Also… wait, did you mean you're now neither a full-time dev nor a writer? What are you up to anyway? So mysterious 😄
And thank you so much for the kind words! I’ve definitely still got a lot of refining to do, both in the wording and the content itself. Always a work in progress...
Agreed. It's always a work in progress much like I think we are haha.
I spent a good chunk of my Saturday night (and super early Sunday morning) prompting projects into existence. I loved that for the first time I wasn't paying attention to tech stacks but making progress on things that have been dead in the water for months.
In my testing, Claude fully delivered (as expected). Gemini did a great job on the visual and UX side but got stuck trying to make it functional. And whatever GPT model they had was pretty lackluster. Had some good ideas here and there but contradicted itself or challenged what I prompted. The only positive side was the speed of generations.
And yes... I'm not neither a (mostly) full-time dev nor a writer. I don't have a label yet to use. 😅 Between growing my publication. Working with people for Bolt's hackathon, training AI models as a gig, and doing field work🏕️ This month's been pretty eventful.
Very informative and educating.
Thank you for sharing this.
Thanks a lot for this overview. My personal website identity is different from my Substack, but I am in the midst of updating it and will definitely be applying some of this wisdom. I particularly loved the high/medium/low commitment idea for the contact form.
“This hybrid workflow gave me the best of both worlds: rapid prototyping with AI, and meaningful customization with human intent.”
I also really appreciated you shouting this out. This is more or less how I use gen AI in my marketing work and it’s a reminder that the best applications of AI are human-centered.
Thank you for this kind and thoughtful note, it means a lot!
And yes, I totally relate to navigating the differences between personal brand spaces (website vs. Substack). I think it’s so brilliant that you’re intentionally updating with clarity—there’s something grounding about aligning identity across platforms.
Would love to see how your updates evolve!
Thank you for the breakdown Jenny. I hadn’t heard of some of these tools before. Haven’t tried creating websites with them either. But i have seen folks use Manus to autonomously build websites which definitely won’t be as customizable but very hands off.
Yes, Manus is definitely one of the more autonomous builders, great if you want something quick and hands-off.
I’ve found that while each tool has its own vibe, the quality is pretty similar. A few minutes of testing usually makes it clear which one clicks for you.
Yeah i think the brand’s vibe and ux are what will differentiate them all. Probably all of them work on the top of the same/similar APIs otherwise. I am gonna try Cursor. From the outset it feels like a great add on to Claude which i currently use for creating python scripts!
Great! Cursor has been my favorite, it might look complex at first, but once you start working with it, everything just flows.
Oh okay i am happy to hear your experience. Even more excited to try it now :)
Website generation is already wild.
If even a lame-o guy like me can generate an awesome looking website with v0 in 1 hour, anyone can.
Otherwise I cannot center a div even if my life depends on it.
For a static website that gets automatically updated, you could hack something together with Github Pages. Might not be able to trigger automatically when you post on Substack (unless you can somehow use a webhook), but if you trigger a Github Action, it could rebuild the website, push it to a gh-pages branch and publish it. Shouldn‘t be difficult, albeit a bit hacky.
I once built a status page for a backend service that worked purely with Github Pages. It displayed incidents and statuses based on created Github Issues.
Yeah, I also do github pages for personal static website hosting and use github actions to pull my latest posts from substack periodically. Basically, just took several rounds of prompts with Claude code to setup all.
That’s a fantastic strategy! Now I’ve got to dig into GitHub Actions, it sounds more powerful than it first appears, and possibly even comparable to other automation tools in some cases. Thanks for sharing your experience :)
Wow, thanks for sharing your experience, Nikola! Website generation really is wild right now. And honestly, I don’t think you’re a lame-o guy at all, you’re super technical and experienced!
The GitHub Pages setup you described is such a clever solution. Definitely more advanced than what I’m doing at the moment.
I’ve been leaning into laziness right now, I just update the code, push it to GitHub, and let Vercel handle all the deployment and updates for me. It’s not fancy, but it works :)
Interesting!
Thank you for this :)
Hope it helps!
Fascinating and so helpful! Thank you for sharing it!
You are welcome! Glad it helps :)
This is the only question that matters now.
AI can build you a perfect, empty house in minutes. The "then what" is the hard part.
It's answering the three questions that code alone can't:
1. Who lives here? (Your audience)
2. What's the vibe? (Your voice)
3. Why should anyone visit? (Your point of view)
That's not a technical problem. It's a strategy problem. And it's the only work that's left.
I also used Cursor to build my company's homepage. I used Figma Make to build my personal homepage. It was very troublesome to modify it before. Because I am not very good at front-end code.
Your sharing is very detailed, I will continue to improve my project and Bolg page. Thanks.