AI + one afternoon = This website

One day this autumn, I decided to rebuild my personal website with the help of Claude AI.

No, it wasn’t because I had suddenly decided to become a web developer in my spare time. The truth is, I was getting a little tired of certain CV and website-building platforms. And apparently, I still haven’t learned to remember all my passwords or all the little conditions attached to free online services. 😅

A few years ago, I spent well over ten hours building my own personal website. Back then, generative AI wasn’t nearly as accessible or widespread as it is today. I had to search for information, experiment, start over, adjust things, and figure everything out step by step. It took time and patience, but eventually, I had a website I was genuinely proud of.

Then I tried Odoo, which offered a free online CV website. The catch? It seemed that I had to log in regularly, roughly every three months, to keep the site active. One day, I simply forgot. And just like that, I could no longer recover the little website I had spent so many hours creating.

Gone. Lost somewhere in the depths of the internet.

A useful reminder that “free” sometimes comes with unexpected costs!

I also gave Wix a try. A few years ago, I found it rather slow at times, and some of its features weren’t particularly intuitive. After struggling with it for a while, I eventually gave up.

I used Canva for a period, too. It was convenient, but without a paid subscription, I often felt limited when it came to customization and getting the design exactly the way I wanted.

So, my personal website project was put on hold for several years.

And then came 2026.

AI has developed at an incredible pace and gradually become part of our everyday lives and working habits. Whether it’s ChatGPT, Claude, or other AI tools, many of us now use them in one way or another. Some even subscribe to paid versions to save time, generate ideas, or solve problems that once seemed unnecessarily complicated.

So I thought: why not make the most of these tools myself?

I started by gathering whatever I could still remember about my old website: its basic structure, the design ideas I had liked, and the personal and professional information I wanted to share. Then I asked Claude to help me bring the project back to life.

I didn’t need to know how to code everything from scratch or have a perfectly defined plan from the beginning. I simply explained what I wanted, looked at the results, requested changes, adjusted the details, and tried again whenever something wasn’t quite right.

From having absolutely no idea where to start to having a nearly finished website, the whole process took roughly one afternoon.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I sat back and watched the magic happen. I still had to think carefully about what I wanted, learn how to communicate my ideas clearly, and decide whether the results actually matched my expectations.

At times, I wondered whether I was using a tool or collaborating with an exceptionally patient assistant who never seemed to get tired of my endless requests for revisions.

And should I call this assistant “he” or “she”? Well, let’s just stick with “AI” for now. 😂

There was another unexpected benefit, too.

As I gradually learned how to work with AI, I realized that this experience could become a new skill to add to my CV. And that’s exactly why you might have noticed the line “Maîtrise des outils d’IA” — proficiency in AI tools — on my résumé.

Why not combine a personal project, a learning experience, and professional development all in one?

Of course, using AI doesn’t mean everything happens automatically. You still need to think, make decisions, test things, check the results, and learn how to ask better questions. But AI can significantly lower the barrier to entry, making it possible to bring ideas to life that might otherwise have been abandoned because of technical difficulties or the time involved.

Now, my website is almost ready. There’s just one final step before it can officially go live: choosing and purchasing a suitable domain name.

This time, I just hope I won’t have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch in a few years because I forgot to log in for three months. 😉

Ultimately, this project is about more than simply rebuilding a personal website. It has been a little learning experiment, a chance to rediscover the pleasure of creating something myself, explore the practical possibilities of AI, and add another skill to my professional toolkit.

Sometimes, all it takes to bring an old project back to life is one afternoon, a little curiosity, and an AI assistant.