In 2019 I Spent 7 Hours Building My Website. This Time It Took 20 Minutes

In 2019, I built my first personal website.

It was a very simple site, made with plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, because that was literally the first thing I knew how to code. I did not know React. I did not know frameworks. I just wanted to make something that existed on the internet and felt like mine.

I still remember that day very clearly. It was Diwali night in my hostel. Puja was going on, people were celebrating, and I had started building the site earlier in the day. At some point I got so hooked that I skipped the puja and just kept coding. That was the first Diwali I did not celebrate properly, because I was busy trying to make a website work.

It took me around 6 or 7 hours.

This time, I built my personal website in about 20 minutes.

That is not because I suddenly became amazing at websites. The bigger difference is that tools have changed. If you know what you want, AI can now help you get there very, very fast.

And I think that is a big deal, especially for people who are not very technical.

I did not try to build a fancy website

One thing I did differently this time was make simpler decisions.

I could have built a bigger site with lots of sections, animations, pages, and tiny details. That is easier than ever now. But I did not want a website that looked busy just because it could.

So I kept it small.

I chose a simple personal website with only the pages that actually mattered:

blog
work
contact

That decision mattered more than any prompt.

AI is fast, but it is still most helpful when you are clear about what you want. In my case, I did not want a full portfolio experience. I wanted a clean personal site that felt easy to read and easy to maintain.

I started with prompts, not code

The biggest shift from 2019 is this: I did not start by opening files and writing everything line by line.

I started by prompting.

I used Claude Code to help generate, edit, and clean up the site. A lot of the work was just me making small decisions in plain English.

Some of my prompts were very normal, which is exactly the point. They were not some secret prompt engineering trick. They were closer to how you would speak to a helpful technical person sitting next to you.

For example, I gave prompts like:

“can u add just my linkedin and twitter and remove other things from about me?”
“can we make a sparkle emoji as icon / logo instead of current astro”
“where can i host this, i wanna buy my domain also”
“i have a cloudflare domain”

That is what I find most interesting about this. You do not need to think like a programmer first. You can often start by saying what you want in normal language.

The useful part was not just speed

What made this fast was not just AI writing code.

It was also that I made a few clear choices early:

1. Keep the site simple

I did not try to include everything. No giant homepage. No endless tabs. No look-at-all-the-things-I-can-do energy.

I only wanted the links that mattered most, so I kept LinkedIn and Twitter and removed the rest.

3. Keep hosting simple too

Since I already had a Cloudflare domain, I used Cloudflare Pages. It kept things straightforward.

4. Make the site readable by AI too

This is a newer kind of decision, and I think more people will start doing it.

I had seen people talking online about adding files like robots.txt and llms.txt so that AI agents and crawlers can better understand a website. That made sense to me. If search engines and AI tools are part of how people discover you now, then your site should be readable by them too, not just by humans.

That is another thing AI tools make easier: once you hear about something useful, you can implement it much faster than before.

What has changed for beginners

Back in 2019, building a website felt like a very technical task. Even a simple one could eat up your whole evening.

Now, for a basic personal website, the barrier is much lower.

You do not need to know a framework before you begin. You do not need to manually figure out every file. You do not need to spend hours stuck on small setup decisions.

You still need taste. You still need to decide what to keep, what to remove, and what actually represents you.

But the distance between “I want a website” and “my website is live” is much shorter now.

That is the part that feels wild to me.

If you want to build one, start small

If you are not very technical and want to make your own personal website, my advice is simple:

Start with the smallest version.

Pick a few sections. Decide what you want people to know about you. Use AI to help you build and edit. Do not wait until you understand everything.

You do not need a huge personal brand website. You need a clear one.

The part that stays with me is not just that this site took 20 minutes. It is that something which once felt difficult, slow, and a little out of reach now feels surprisingly possible. If you have been putting off building your own website because it sounds too technical, I really think that has changed. You can start simple, use AI well, and put something real on the internet much faster than you think.