In today’s blog post, I’d like to share with you the process of creating my blog website.

Why am I writing about this topic so soon, even though it’s a more complex one? The reason is that I already mentioned earlier that over time you’ll be able to follow how my site evolves with the help of AI. That’s why I want to document the process right from the start—so you can later see how the blog grows, what new features are added, and how it develops step by step. As I already said before launching, the site would be built with the help of AI, not on top of an existing engine or CMS—and that’s exactly how it turned out. I wanted to demonstrate what AI is capable of. So this is a completely custom development, not only without a CMS, but also without frameworks like Laravel or Symfony.

You might ask: if there’s no CMS engine or framework, and everything was written from scratch, doesn’t that mean it was an enormous job? Well, in reality, the working V1 version you see here took me about two weeks in total with AI’s help. And I’m not even a programming guru—my background is more in multimedia and quality assurance—so this is really good news. Why is this such a big deal? Because not long ago, developing such a custom site with this level of functionality would have required a team of several developers working 1–2 months at minimum.

But that doesn’t mean developers are out of a job. In my opinion, if you have no basic knowledge of programming, databases, or web servers, you won’t be able to build anything meaningful even with AI. Yes, AI will spit out basic code from your prompts, and sometimes it might even run—but as you continue developing, it will quickly become full of errors, and you won’t know what to fix or where to copy things. I’d rather put it this way: if you know programming at a beginner level, with AI you’ll work at an intermediate level; if you’re intermediate, AI will help you perform at an advanced level, and you’ll get there faster. So instead of replacing jobs, AI makes the process more efficient and quicker. But some degree of human knowledge, supervision, and assistance is still absolutely necessary.

So what did I manage to accomplish in those two weeks? The UI part you see outside only took 1–2 days. Once I had my design idea, AI quickly produced a demo that didn’t work yet but showed me where to go next. The real time-consuming part was the admin panel and the backend engine that powers everything. Since I like to configure my sites myself, I implemented almost every settings option (with AI’s help), including LiteSpeed server optimization and cache management. Of course, all the core features are done too: managing and formatting posts, image handling, SEO optimization, etc. I even developed a smiley insertion feature for posts using AI. So this two-week sprint included everything essential—and even comfort features. It’s not a half-baked product; it’s fully functional and ready to launch.

What’s still missing? For now, tag management is not clickable yet—you can filter by categories but not tags. That’s not uncommon, and eventually I’ll refine it. To summarize, the two weeks covered:

  • UI with animated header, featured post section, menu, post/category/tag management, and basic stats

  • Admin panel with post management, category and tag editing, SEO settings, image manager, and basic analytics

  • Extra options like server configs, advanced SEO, caching, dynamic pages

  • Backend with additional security layers

In short, nearly everything needed for a solid launch. Something that would normally take a dev team months to build, I managed in weeks with AI.

But what if you have no developer skills, yet you want to learn now that AI makes “miracles” possible? The good news is: if you at least learn the basics of a programming language, plus some server, hosting, and database fundamentals, then with AI you can create serious projects—even something like this blog engine, or your own unique website, or even a full app. You can even use AI itself to help you learn the basics, though platforms like Udemy and video courses might be easier for getting started. Without any knowledge at all, though, you won’t be able to build sites or apps—even with AI. You won’t know how things are structured, what a backend is, what an API is, how to create a database, or how to secure your site in the “wild west” of the internet. On top of that, many things are environment-specific, and AI won’t decide them for you—you’ll need to know what to configure, like your preferred web server settings.

So yes, basic knowledge is essential if you want to build apps or websites with AI. Think of it like this: your own knowledge is one arm, and AI gives you an extra arm—you’ll be able to reach much farther, but you still need your own.

Back to my blog engine: I tried to have AI code as much as possible, while I only intervened minimally. That way, you can really see what AI is capable of. The layout, structure, and tile design are my own ideas, but AI coded a big part of it. For example, the electric sparks running across the grid in the featured section on the homepage—that was my idea, but AI wrote the animation. It didn’t get it right on the first try; I had to guide it several times, but eventually it worked. 🔦 As I said, I’ll keep improving the engine as AI improves—so my blog will continue evolving. Exciting, right? 🏆

I’m sure you’re wondering: which AI did I use to code this? My answer: definitely not ChatGPT. Unfortunately, even the newest version 5 isn’t capable of handling tasks this complex. It can write basic snippets and some clever solutions, but they’re very limited, often ugly (especially in CSS), and progress is slow—you’d need months to finish a project. And that’s without mentioning its “two-bit memory,” forgetting what it coded just a few prompts earlier. 😀 This applies even to the paid version. That said, ChatGPT 5 is still a fantastic AI—just not optimized for programming. It’s much stronger in conversations, writing, analysis, research, and data handling.

For coding, I personally find Anthropic’s Claude models much stronger. My favorite among chat AIs. The problem is, they’re not free—if you subscribe directly through Anthropic, it’s insanely expensive. Just 5–7 prompts can cost the equivalent of $2–3, and that’s not even enough to build a login screen. The solution is to subscribe through an AI-powered development tool. GitHub Copilot or Windsurf, for example. These give you access to multiple AI models (6–8 of them) at a reasonable monthly fixed price, which is much better value.

There’s very little info about this online, so I had to figure it out myself—registering for tons of AI services and testing them one by one. What you’re reading here is entirely my own experience and research, not copied from AI or other websites. Most of the internet still only talks about ChatGPT—but that’s just one small slice of the AI world. The ecosystem is much bigger now.

So yes—my site was built (and is still being developed) with Anthropic Claude Sonnet 4, integrated with Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot. Claude isn’t magic either—it still requires at least basic knowledge and a lot of human guidance. Its memory isn’t much better than ChatGPT’s, so you often have to re-feed context, though it does remember a bit more across prompts. But when combined with dev tools like VS Code + Copilot, you can work across multiple files at once. This setup is called an AI agent, since it can help across an entire project, not just one file—making it far better for development.

So the engine behind my blog is built with Claude Sonnet 4 + VS Code + GitHub Copilot. Of course, there are other possible setups, but this is the one I chose.

As for the images on my site: they’re all my own designs, created to match each post, but generated with AI using OpenArt.ai. So even the images are not ChatGPT’s. I’ll write more about image generation in another post, since that’s a huge topic on its own.

And what should you do once you have the basic knowledge—how do you go about building your dream app or website? For example, a “virtual flower garden” 🧄 project, or whatever idea you may have. I’ll cover that in a future blog post. 😉

If you enjoy my blog, feel free to follow my Facebook page (link under this post), and you can also comment on posts using the “Comment” button below—this will take you to the Facebook share of the article, where you can join the discussion and share your thoughts.