AI Websites Are Built for Coders

You've seen the posts. Someone cancels their website builder, rebuilds the whole thing with AI over a weekend, and says the website platform is dead. Some of them start agencies around it. Most of them call it the future.

Full disclosure: we build on Squarespace for a living, so discount this accordingly. But we also build with AI ourselves, our own tools and our own client software, on the same stack everyone is excited about. So this isn't an outside opinion.

And we're all for it. AI is fast. If you need a landing page by Friday, a microsite for a launch, or a quick one-pager for an idea you're testing, an AI-built site beats a template every time. That part is real, and it keeps getting better.

What nobody talks about

What nobody talks about is what happens after the site is built. A website isn't something you make once and walk away from. It has to keep running. You still need hosting. A domain. DNS set up correctly. An SSL certificate that doesn't expire. A real plan, not the free one, because the free one puts someone else's name on your business. You need somewhere to store your images. A way to edit your own content. A contact form that actually delivers. Analytics. Backups. If you sell anything, a checkout that stays secure.

We run our own software on this exact stack, and the free tiers were great, right up until it became a real product with real customers. Then it's a subscription for the database, another for storage, another for email, another for the CMS, plus the AI tool itself. Each one is cheap on its own. Add them up and you've rebuilt a Squarespace bill across six different companies, except now you're the one holding it all together, and you're the one who gets the call when something breaks at night.

Fine for a coder

If you're a coder, none of this is a problem. Wiring up tools and keeping them running is what you already do. You have the skills, and picking the best tool for each job can actually work in your favor. The overhead isn't a burden. It's just the work.

The problem is who these tools are actually sold to. The pitch is that you don't need a developer anymore. But the person hearing that is usually the one who least wants to be one. The baker. The lawyer. The photographer. The contractor. They never wanted a stack of tools to manage. They wanted a website. Handing them an AI build and walking away is handing them a second job they never asked for, and it's almost inhumane to do that to someone who isn't comfortable with technology.

A website isn't a one-person job

It gets harder the moment more than one person needs to use the site. A real business website isn't run by one person. Someone writes the copy, someone swaps the photo for a sale, someone in the back adds a new location. On a platform, they each just log in. On an AI stack, changing a headline turns into a message to whoever built it. There's no AI tool yet that lets a non-technical team work inside a website together the way Squarespace, WordPress, or Webflow already do. Maybe there will be. There isn't one now.

AI just wrote the code

Here's the simplest way to put it. Building your site out of AI tools is custom code, except the AI writes the code instead of you. That's a real improvement, because writing it was always the slow part. But everything else custom code always asked for is still there: the setup, the upkeep, the pile of tools that don't really talk to each other. Platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Webflow, and Squarespace exist because the industry spent years turning all of that into one login and one bill. AI didn't get rid of that work. It just wrote the code part and left the rest.

AI can build the website in minutes. Running it is still a full-time job, and the only question is whose.

So when someone shows you an AI-built site and tells you platforms are finished, the real question isn't whether AI can build a website. It obviously can. The question is who runs it next month, after the person who built it has moved on. If that's a coder, great. Use the tools, we do too. If it's someone who just wanted a website and isn't technical, then all the overhead they were promised they'd escaped is exactly what they're left holding.

When a real AI platform finally shows up, the whole thing in one place, one bill, something a non-technical team can actually use, we'll be first in line, and we'll say so. Until then, we keep the experiments as experiments, and we build client websites where the ecosystem is already whole.