I built hundreds of AI-generated websites. Here's what surprised me.

IL — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 19:06:14 +0000

When I started building an AI website generator, I thought the biggest challenge would be the prompts.

I was wrong.

The prompts were actually the easy part.

The surprising part was everything around them.

For example, I expected AI to struggle with layouts.

It didn't.

After a few iterations, the layouts were good enough.

What consistently failed was understanding the business.

A plumber doesn't need the same homepage as a dentist.

A coffee shop shouldn't look like a law firm.

That sounds obvious.

It wasn't obvious to the AI.

So I stopped spending time improving the HTML.

I started spending time improving the context.

Instead of asking the model to "build a website", I gave it information about the business.

Its industry.

Its services.

Its goals.

Its customers.

The output changed dramatically.

That taught me something interesting.

Website generation isn't really a design problem.

It's a context problem.

The better the context, the less the model has to guess.

Then another problem appeared.

The generated website looked good.

But business owners still wanted to change things.

Opening hours.

Services.

Phone numbers.

Photos.

That's when I realized something else.

Generating a website is a one-time event.

Maintaining it is the real product.

Most website builders optimize for the first five minutes.

Users spend the next five years editing that website.

That's the experience that actually matters.

AI made creating websites incredibly easy.

Now the challenge is making them stay useful.

And that's a much more interesting problem to solve.

DEV Community: IL