This website had grown over several years. It had old pages, images that no longer loaded, links that pointed nowhere and a design that no longer said much about what I do now: studying digital power and working on the rules that govern it. I did not want to spend my weekends inside the WordPress editor, so I handed the job to AI assistants and kept notes. This is a plain account of what that looked like, including the parts that went wrong.

What I asked for

The brief was short. Tidy everything up. Use a constructivist look, with bold type, hard edges and a red, black and cream palette. Make the black match the black in my logo. Place the new images and icons I had uploaded. Make the links work. I did not want to rewrite the content, because a separate AI had already drafted most of the new text.

What the AI did well

The biggest gain was joined-up work. Claude was connected to my WordPress account, so it could read the site before changing anything, rather than guessing from a screenshot.

• It found the boring faults. Images were pointing at bare filenames instead of my uploads, a link had tracking junk in it, a block was duplicated and one of my two LinkedIn addresses was wrong.
• It changed things once, in the right place. Switching the black was one change to the site’s theme settings, not an edit to every page.
• It handled the plumbing. A second AI produced a much better single-page design in plain HTML. Claude helped me host it on Netlify, move this blog to its own address, point my main domain at the new site and write redirects, so that old links to my posts still work.

Where a human was still needed

Almost every problem was in a place the AI could not see or could not decide.

• Facts. The generated site shipped with a placeholder email address and made claims about me that I had to check line by line. An assistant that writes confidently is not the same as one that has verified anything.
• Looking at the result. The AI reads a page’s code, not its pixels. It was me who noticed that the header bar was a slightly different black from my icon.
• Logins and uploads. It could change my DNS records but could not sign in to Netlify for me, and it could not drag a folder onto a web page. I did those steps.
• Quirks. My first redirect file was ignored, because drag-and-drop uploads do not read one of the file formats. A free hosting tier also ran out of credits part-way through. Both were found by checking, not by assuming.

What I would do again

1. Let the assistant read first and change second, and ask it to say what it plans to change.
2. Back up before anything hard to undo. For me that meant saving a copy of my DNS records before touching them.
3. Treat generated claims as drafts until a person has checked them.
4. Prefer changes that can be reversed, and make the one risky switch last.
5. Check the live result yourself, on your phone as well as your computer.

A note from my day job’s territory

Letting an AI act inside your accounts is a small version of a bigger question. Who is allowed to do what, how do you see what was done, and who is answerable when it goes wrong? Here the answers were reassuring. It asked before publishing, the changes were visible and reversible, and the mistakes were small. But it was a low-stakes project with one person watching closely, and that is worth remembering before scaling it up.