I'm an engineer and know how to build and run things in the cloud.

I'm an engineer and know how to build and run things in the cloud. But never learned WordPress, it annoys me. 😂

About three years ago odd, I started setting up a WordPress site for my consultancy. Never finished, was too busy working. But TBH I couldn't bring myself to finish it, it bloody annoyed me as I know if I could be bothered I could do better in css/html myself..

Eventually I thought, sod it, I'll just build it with AI.

Five hours later, I have a site that's not bad for a CSS hopeless engineer (FYI I hate FE work as those that know me know well), this isn't just a shameless plug for my consultancy services 😉

I'm not a web designer, but I know how to run things in the cloud. It's a static precompiled site, driven by Markdown, deployed to S3 behind CloudFront.

Costs next to nothing to run.

To be clear, that's because I know how to build and run it that way. There's no huge moat here. I'm sure will be a thousand articles about running websites for pennies without real application functionality. But for a simple marketing site with a bunch of pages, why learn WordPress or pay for developers and integration engineers if you're already an engineer and know the technical route?

Most of the five hours went on copy, formatting and design stuff, I planned the rest upfront.

I used Cursor + ChatGPT, with different models for different jobs

🔹 Grok 4.6 for copy. Far better at writing something that sounds human, in my experience.

🔹Composer 2.5 for coding. Decent enough, but cant write a paragraph of user-facing text for love nor money though. 😂

🔹ChatGPT for design and images, I like to do that in parallel with agents doing code changes with design ideas and generate mockups. Then I passed those into my Grok agent in Cursor to apply and fiddle with the CSS (again Composer come on its just CSS be better).

Right AI for the right job.

But the bit I really love? The end result and I don't mean the site, I've got agent skills that know how to update, build and deploy the site.

I can literally speak into my microphone and have a change live in about 20 seconds (I tested a copy change), without touching a keyboard.

No WordPress editor. No messing about.

I've also created LinkedIn skills to pull my posts and publish them to the site. In fact, this very post should be on the website about 60 seconds after I publish it here unless I distracted by real life (probably), could/should automate it but it is a 10 second prompt so is the ROI there 🙂

It's not about AI replacing engineering knowledge. Its about using that knowledge to skip the tooling and friction you don't need.

Three years procrastinating over WordPress.

Five hours building something I actually like and enjoyed doing it. Tomorrow maybe restyle 😉

🔹Next-to-zero hosting costs.

🔹Fully automated build and deploy pipeline.

🔹Smoke tests.

🔹Updates by talking to an AI agent and telling it what I want

Love it. 😎 If my design skills aren't up to the job, its not my day job 🤣