AI makes it pretty.
Can you actually ship it?

I'm not going to pretend AI didn't change the trade. It changed the trade. Pretending otherwise just to justify an invoice would be lying to you.

Today AI writes a decent landing page in the time it takes me to open the editor. It generates forms, builds tables, proposes color palettes that don't embarrass anyone, and translates copy better than a rushed human. For prototyping ideas it's brilliant: in one afternoon you can try five versions of a page and see which one you like.

Ask AI about your site once the project is "ready". That's where the part nobody shows on YouTube begins.

The domain and the email that never arrives

You connected the domain, uploaded the files, and the page loads. Nice. Now send a test message from the contact form to a Gmail address. Did it arrive? Or did it land in spam because nobody configured SPF, DKIM and DMARC? I've seen businesses lose customers for months over this and only find out when someone said "I emailed you and you never replied".

Payments don't forgive

Taking money is easy until this happens: the customer pays, the webhook fails, the order never gets marked as paid, and you have the money with zero records. Or worse: the user double-clicks "pay" and you charge them twice. Or they ask for a refund and there's no button for that. A payment gateway isn't a pretty form — it's a system with states, retries, idempotency and reconciliation. AI gets you 60%. The other 40% you have to know.

The security nobody tests

A form that writes straight into the database without validation is an open door. A file with the server keys pushed to a public repo is an open door with a sign that says "please come in". AI generates code that works; whether it's also secure is a different conversation, and it doesn't always make it into the answer.

Technical SEO, which is boring and decides everything

A site looking good doesn't mean Google understands it. Canonical tags, hreflang, sitemaps, 301 redirects, structured data, real load time on a mid-range phone with bad signal. This very site you're reading needed a bilingual architecture with separate URLs — otherwise Google received two different contents at the same address and ranked neither. That's not a prompt.

A website isn't a photo. It's a plant. And like any plant, it dies if nobody waters it.

Let me tell you something that happened to this site recently. A deployment failed and the page went down. The cause? Nothing glamorous: the server disk was full. A few old videos nobody used were taking up 72 MB, and the system couldn't write a single one-kilobyte file anymore. It wasn't AI, it wasn't the code, it wasn't a hacker. It was disk space.

Finding it took a while: reading logs, testing uploads of different sizes, measuring folders, discovering that locked files don't show up in the FTP listing. That is the real work of keeping a system in production. It doesn't show up in a portfolio, it doesn't get applause, but it's the difference between "my page exists" and "my business works today".

And it's not just disk: SSL certificates that expire, dependencies with vulnerabilities, backups you never tested restoring, email that stops sending because someone changed a port. All of it happens quietly — until it happens at the worst possible moment.

Before saying "my site is ready", try answering these without googling. If you fail three or more, it isn't ready:

• 1. Does the contact form reach your inbox when you test it from a phone?
• 2. What happens if a customer pays twice? What's the plan?
• 3. Where are your server credentials right now?
• 4. If the site goes down on a Sunday, do you find out or do your customers?
• 5. When does the SSL certificate expire?
• 6. Do you have a backup, and do you know how to restore it?
• 7. Is Google showing the title and description you want?
• 8. How fast does it load on mobile data, not on your office fiber?
• 9. Who owns the domain, and under which account?
• 10. If you want to change something tomorrow, do you know where to touch it without breaking something else?

None of those ten questions appear in a prompt. All of them appear on a real invoice.

Plenty. You just have to put it in the right place.

The right question isn't "can AI build my website?". The right question is "who answers when it breaks at 3 AM?". If the answer is you, great — go learn the ten questions above. If you'd rather it wasn't you, then you already know what you're buying when you hire someone.