I am a builder at heart. But let’s be honest: setting up a personal website has always been a chore.

In the past, this meant a weekend of friction: fighting with CSS, debugging obscure build errors, and wrestling with DNS propagation. It was “undifferentiated heavy lifting”—work that had to be done but added zero unique value to the world.

This time, I tried something different. I built this site (tribhuwan.dev) not just with AI, but through AI. The result? The entire process—from empty directory to live global SSL—took less than an hour.

The Surprise Factor

The surprise wasn’t that the AI could write code. We know it can do that. The surprise was the continuity of flow.

Usually, when you hit a snag—like a version mismatch in a CI/CD pipeline or a canonicalization issue with DNS—you stop. You Google. You read StackOverflow. You lose momentum.

With AI, I simply stated the intent: “I need a deployment script for Hugo on GitHub Pages.” When an error popped up, I didn’t debug it manually; I fed the context back to the AI. It corrected the syntax, adjusted the version numbers, and we moved on.

The friction didn’t disappear, but it became negligible. It felt less like “coding” and more like “directing.”

The Stack (Crisp & Clean)

For those curious about the architecture, we kept it ruthlessly simple to ensure performance and longevity:

  • The Engine: Hugo (Static Site Generator). No database, no security vulnerabilities, blazing fast.
  • The Skin: PaperMod. A minimalist theme that respects the reader’s time.
  • The Pipeline: GitHub Actions. A simple YAML workflow that builds and deploys automatically on every push.
  • The Edge: Cloudflare. Handling DNS, SSL, and redirects before traffic even hits the server.

The Lesson for Leaders

I am sharing this process to highlight a shift in how we work.

As engineers, we often take pride in doing things the hard way. We treat the struggle as a badge of honor. But as leaders, our job is to maximize impact.

AI didn’t do the work for me; it removed the drag from me. It handled the boilerplate and the config syntax, allowing me to focus entirely on the architecture and the message.

If you are holding back on building something because you dread the setup: start now. The barrier to entry has never been lower.