By Aditya Sahai · 2026-10-21
You're reading this on a website that was designed and built with AI as my co-pilot.
Not "I typed one prompt and a website appeared". More like working with a very fast, very literal engineer who never gets tired and needs a lot of direction.
What I decided
The feeling. I wanted the site to feel like a creator's sketchbook that came alive: playful, loud, a little chaotic, and still easy to read.
The palette, borrowed from Thinking Beyond Club, so my whole world feels connected. The rule that nothing fake goes on the page: no invented numbers, no fake testimonials. The copy, the stories, and every "no, that's not it" along the way.
What the AI did
The heavy lifting. Writing the code for the physics stickers you can throw around, the letters that flip colour, the cards that fan out, the page transitions.
Wiring the newsletter so it actually sends, and lets people unsubscribe in one click. Testing every page at phone and laptop sizes and catching bugs I'd never have spotted.
What broke
Plenty. A headline rendered one letter per line. Yellow letters disappeared on a yellow background. My name was too big and wrapped onto two lines. On phones, a hanging string covered the content.
None of these were hard to fix. But every one of them needed someone to look at the screen and say "that's wrong". The AI writes the code. The eye catches the problem.
💡 AI doesn't remove the need for taste. It removes everything between your taste and the finished thing.
What I'd tell you
Start with the feeling, not the features. Write down three words for how your site should feel before you write a single prompt.
Steal from your own world. Your colours, your phrases, your stories. That's what makes it yours.
Look at everything on a real phone. Most people will.
And keep the AI on a short leash: small steps, check each one, then move on.
The point
Five years ago, a site like this needed a designer, a developer, a copywriter and a few weeks. Today it needs one person with clear taste and a good co-pilot.
That's the whole idea behind being a Creative AI Operator. The tools got cheap. The taste is still the job.