This website was built by one person and a team of AI coding agents. That sentence makes some developers nervous and some business owners excited. Both are partly right. The difference between a mess and a working site is the process around the agents, so here is ours.
Rule 1: brand before pages
Before a single page existed, the brand did: colors, type, spacing, voice rules and components, written down as files in the same repository as the site. Agents are very good at following rules and very bad at inventing taste. So I give them the taste up front.
Rule 2: every job is a work order
Nothing gets built from a vague “make the homepage”. Each piece of work is a numbered work order with:
- what to build, page by page,
- where every piece of copy comes from,
- what “done” means, as a list of checks.
This site went from scaffold to launch in a handful of work orders: the Astro setup, the brand components, the homepage and Mode pages, pricing, about, contact and legal pages, and the free check page.
Rule 3: every claim needs a source
Agents will happily write “trusted by 500+ businesses” if nobody stops them. So every sentence on this site is traced to a source document in a claim-to-source table. If a claim has no source, it doesn’t ship. That is how the site ended up with no invented testimonials, logos or numbers.
Rule 4: “done” is measured, not declared
Each work order ships as a pull request. An automated build runs on every pull request, and the acceptance checks include performance. When a founder photo slowed the about page down, the work order was not done until the image was fixed and the page passed again. Agents say “done” a lot. The checks decide.
Rule 5: a human reviews and merges
The agents write most of the code. I write the work orders, review every pull request and decide what merges. When something comes back wrong, it goes back as a fix cycle with the exact problem written down, not a vague “try again”.
What this means for you
You don’t need to care how your website is built. You should care that whoever builds it can answer three questions:
- Where did this text come from?
- How do you know it’s fast?
- What happens when something breaks?
If the answers are vague, the site will be too. Mine are written down, which is why this one shipped.
The stack, for the curious: Astro, static pages, hosted on Hostinger. No page builder, no cookies, nothing to slow it down.