I build websites and iOS apps with AI agents. I’m saying that up front because I think you should know how the thing you’re paying for gets made, and because a lot of people in my line of work use these tools without mentioning it.
Here’s how it actually works day to day, what the tools are good at, where they fall down, and the parts of the job I don’t hand off.
What “building with AI agents” means for me
An AI agent, the way I use it, is a model that can read files, write code, run commands, and check its own work, not just answer questions in a chat window. I mostly use Anthropic’s Claude for this. I give it a job like “build the services section from these notes” or “find out why this form isn’t sending email,” and it works through the problem in my project, step by step, while I watch and steer.
It’s closer to working with a very fast junior developer than using a website builder. It writes a lot. I read all of it.
Every client site and every app I’ve shipped, including Social Season Club, Friendor, Tucked and Cruise on the App Store, was built this way. I did the design decisions, the reviewing, the testing and the release. The agents did a lot of the typing.
What the agents are good at
- The first draft of almost anything. Page layouts, the code that makes a site work on phones, contact forms, the structured data that helps Google understand a local business. Work that used to take me a full day can take an hour.
- Boring, careful work. Writing alt text for 40 images, checking every page for broken links, renaming things consistently across a project. They don’t get bored.
- Finding problems. I ask agents to review code the way a skeptical coworker would. They catch real bugs, including ones I wrote.
- Explaining unfamiliar things. When Apple changes a rule or a tool updates, an agent can read the documentation and tell me what changed for my project specifically.
What they get wrong
This is the part people leave out.
They make things up. Ask an AI to write an About section from a Google listing and it will happily invent that you’ve been “family owned since 1998” or that you serve six cities you’ve never driven to. It sounds right. It isn’t. Every fact on a client site gets checked with the owner before it goes live. If I can’t confirm it, it comes out.
They’re often almost right. Code that works in the demo and breaks on a real phone. A color that looks fine on my screen and fails accessibility contrast for someone with low vision. Developers notice this too: in Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey, 84 percent of developers said they use AI tools but only 29 percent said they trust them, and “almost right” output was the top frustration.
They write like AI. Left alone, the copy fills up with brochure words nobody says out loud and sentences that could be about any business in any city. I keep a written list of banned words and phrases, and a script checks every page and every blog post against it before anything ships. It’s also why you won’t find a single long dash in my writing. They’re one of the clearest tells of generated text, so I don’t use them at all.
They feel faster than they are. A research group called METR ran a controlled study in 2025 and found that experienced developers were actually 19 percent slower with AI tools while believing they were 20 percent faster. That stuck with me. I try to judge the tools by what ships, not by how productive the afternoon felt.
Every mistake becomes a rule
The most useful habit I’ve built is writing down every failure as a rule the agents have to follow next time.
One real example: a build of Social Season Club once went out with the word “undefined” where real settings should have been, because a configuration file was missing on the machine that built it. There were zero errors during the build. It only showed up in the finished app. Now there’s a check that runs before every app build and refuses to continue if that file is missing, and another that searches the finished app for the word “undefined.” It hasn’t happened since.
I keep a running list of these for apps and another for websites. The agents read it at the start of every job. That list is honestly worth more than any single tool, because it means the same mistake doesn’t get made twice by me or by a model.
What I still do myself
- Talking to you. Understanding what your business needs, what your customers ask on the phone, and what you’re tired of explaining. No tool does that.
- Checking facts. Hours, prices, services, licenses, service area. All of it gets confirmed by you.
- Design judgment. Whether a page feels like your business or like a template. Whether a button is obvious. Whether it looks right on a cheap Android phone in bright sunlight.
- Reading every page before it goes live. Every word.
- The unglamorous setup. Domains, email that actually arrives, your Google Business Profile, backups. These take the same time they always did.
- Being accountable. If something on your site is wrong, that’s on me, not on a model.
Does this make websites cheaper?
Somewhat, and I’ll be straight about where. The first draft got much faster. That’s why I can afford to build you a preview of your site before you pay anything, which used to be a strange thing for a designer to offer.
What didn’t get faster is everything around the build: waiting on photos, rounds of changes, getting a domain back from an old account, testing email, training you to make small edits. By my own estimates the build itself is only a small slice of the hours in a finished site. So my prices sit below most Dallas agencies, but they aren’t $99. I wrote about what websites actually cost in DFW if you want the numbers.
Why I’m telling you this
Because you should get to decide how you feel about it. Some people love that their site was built with modern tools. Some people would rather know there’s a person checking the work. With me you get both, and you get to see the result before you spend anything.
See your site before you decide
If you run a business in Dallas-Fort Worth and want a website, I’ll build you a free preview first. Tell me about your business on the project form and I’ll put one together so you can see your actual site, not a template. You don’t pay anything until you’ve seen it and said yes.
You can also look through the websites I’ve built and the apps I’ve shipped first.