Who needs Squarespace anymore?
This newsletter isn’t about AI. It’s about trying things — in streaming, media, and tech — and sharing what actually happens.
I built three websites with AI. No templates, no drag-and-drop, no €12/month. Here’s what actually happened.
Not mockups. Not Figma files. Actual, live, indexed-by-Google, people-are-visiting-them-right-now landing pages.
Total time spent: maybe six hours. Across all three.
I’m not a frontend developer. I can write some code. I’ve been in tech for 25 years, I’ve managed engineering teams, I know what a div does. But my CSS has always been the kind of CSS that makes actual frontend people physically uncomfortable. The kind where you throw !important at everything and hope for the best.
So when I tell you I shipped three websites that don’t look like garbage, you should understand what that means.
Page one: my consulting site. I’d been putting this off for literally years. You know the drill. You need a personal website. You open Squarespace, you pick a template, you start customizing, and forty-five minutes later you’re deep in the typography settings trying to decide if the heading should be 42px or 44px and honestly questioning your life choices. I’ve started that process maybe four times. Never finished.
This time, I sat down with Claude, described what I wanted (consulting page, streaming industry, case studies from M6 and Afrostream, a way to book calls) and just... iterated. Back and forth. “Make the hero bigger.” “Add a case study section.” “The CTA doesn’t feel right.” Iterate until it stops bothering you. Bostral.com was live in under two hours. With case studies, testimonials section, call booking integration, the whole thing. Oh, and it’s available in Mandarin and Spanish. I don’t speak Mandarin. I don’t speak Spanish. Ni hao and hola is roughly where my skills end. My English is functional at best, and my French sits somewhere between Brittany and Paris depending on how tired I am. But sure, my website speaks four languages now. That’s fine. Everything is fine.
Page two: a bar. Yeah, you read that right. I invested in a bar in Nantes. Le Wagon, quai de la Fosse, lovely spot, go there if you’re in town. Which is ironic because my last mimosa was in 2012, in Vegas, and I’m still not sure it counted. But François, the owner, needed a website. Now François is a bartender. A very good one. He is not, and I say this with love, a web developer. The man doesn’t have Instagram. I had to force him to create a Facebook page, which took him an afternoon. In the old world, this meant either: (a) paying someone €2,000+ for a WordPress site, (b) spending three weekends fighting with Wix, or (c) having no website. François was solidly at (c).
I built lewagon-nantes.com in one afternoon. Menu, hours, location, reviews from Google, nice photos, FAQ for SEO, the whole nine yards. It looks professional. It was made by a guy who owns a streaming newsletter sitting in his living room talking to an AI.
Page three: Podvore. This one’s my side project, a podcast discovery tool I’m building. Needed a landing page to explain what it does before the product is even ready. Classic early-stage move. Podvore.com was probably the fastest one. Two hours, maybe less. Because by this point I’d figured out the rhythm.
So what do I actually use.
The tool is Claude Code. It runs in your terminal. I’m a terminal guy, have been since the late 90s. So yeah, I’m biased. For a lot of people, opening a terminal already feels like defusing a bomb. Not my problem right now. You type what you want in plain English, and it writes the files, edits them, creates new ones, runs commands. It’s not a chat where you copy-paste code back and forth. It is the coding environment. You talk, it builds, you see the result, you talk again.
The other thing that matters is a file called claude.md. Think of it as a permanent brief that lives in your project folder. Mine says things like “this is a landing page for a streaming consultant, the tone should be professional but not corporate, use this color palette, the primary CTA is booking a call.” Every time Claude Code starts working on your project, it reads that file first. So it never forgets the context. It never starts from scratch. It’s like having an intern who actually reads the brief. Every single time.
You build up that file over time. First version is three lines. Then you add “never use gradients.” Then “the mobile version should stack vertically.” Then “François’s bar opens Tuesday to Saturday, not Monday.” It becomes the memory of your project. And honestly, writing a good claude.md is half the work. If you can describe what you want clearly enough for that file, you can build it.
Now the ugly part.
To get your site from “it works on my laptop” to “it’s live on the internet,” you need to push it somewhere. I tried Netlify, which is fine. I tried Vercel, which is great. I did not insert my debit card into Vercel because I’ve read enough horror stories about outlier invoices to know better. The standard path is GitHub, then auto-deploy to your host. Which means you need git. Which means you need to understand repositories, commits, pushes, branches. Or at least pretend to.
And that’s the wall. Not the AI part. Not the design part. The wall is git. git add . git commit -m "stuff" git push origin main. This looks like someone fell asleep on a keyboard. And if something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong), the error messages read like threats written by a robot lawyer.
A landing page is a pit stop, not the finish line. You can upload your HTML files straight to Netlify and skip git entirely. But most projects don’t stay a landing page. They grow, they change, you add stuff. And the moment that happens, you want to know what you changed and when. That’s git. The wall isn’t going anywhere.
So why not just use Squarespace? To be fair, they added an AI layer. I don’t care. I’m free. My sites are files I own. Not rented templates on someone else’s server. No €12/month. No platform lock-in. First article of this newsletter and I’m already killing any chance of a Squarespace sponsorship. That’s got to be some kind of record. Follow the steps, get the result, same result as everyone else. It’s IKEA for websites. I burn IKEA gift cards. Not a metaphor. People give me IKEA gift cards and I burn them. I don’t want your manual. I don’t want your template. I want to build something that looks like what I had in my head.
You don’t need to read the manual anymore. There is no manual. But you need to understand what you’re building. Why this section exists. Why this CTA should be above the fold. Why the tone feels off. The knowledge shifted. From “how to operate the tool” to “what am I actually trying to say.”
That’s a better trade.
Here’s what matters though. When a landing page takes two hours instead of two weeks, you just... try more stuff. Podvore exists as a public thing partly because I could spin up a landing page fast enough that the idea didn’t die in the “I should really make a website for this” phase. Le Wagon has a web presence because the friction dropped below François’s threshold of bothering.
That’s the real story. Not “AI writes code.” That’s boring. The gap between “I had an idea” and “it exists on the internet” just got absurdly small. And when that gap shrinks, more ideas survive. Most of them still won’t work. But at least they get to exist long enough to fail properly.
I wrote something on my other newsletter, Streaming Radar, a few months ago. The thesis was that AI doesn’t replace execution. It amplifies the gap between people who know what to build and people who don’t. I still believe that. These three landing pages don’t matter because AI wrote HTML. They matter because I knew exactly what each site needed to say, and the tool got out of my way fast enough to let me say it. Not the code. The clarity.
This article was written with Claude. Not “inspired by” or “assisted by.” I mean I talked, it wrote, I said “no that’s not right,” it rewrote, I said “add the bit about the mimosa,” it added the bit about the mimosa. The exact same loop I described for building landing pages. Because of course it is.
I could pretend I wrote every sentence myself. That would be stupid given the whole point of this newsletter. So here we are. Somewhere on the edge of the internet, in a living room in Nantes, armed with one terminal, one AI, zero mimosas since Vegas 2012, and not nearly enough substance abuse to qualify as gonzo journalism. We can’t stop here. This is newsletter country.
This is Ludo Tries Things. Half experiments, half curiosity, zero guru energy. Subscribe if that sounds like your kind of mess.