Human vision leads. AI builds the front end.

A small business's website has to say something specific: what makes this bowling alley worth a Saturday night, what makes this soap worth the price, what makes this arboretum worth becoming a member of. That's a judgment call, not a computation. Every project starts by looking hard at a real business and deciding what its site should look, sound, and feel like — the same way any designer works, with references, instinct, and a point of view. That decision is never handed to AI.

Once the direction is set, Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding assistant) is the tool that writes the actual HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from that direction — the same practice used to build this site and every site linked from it. Think of it as a very fast, very literal builder: it doesn't choose a palette, invent copy, or decide what a client's site should emphasize. It executes a decision that's already been made, fast enough that a full custom build costs less than most businesses pay for a template subscription.

This isn't a one-off policy for this page. It's the same discipline behind the UX research work at mikewkennedy.com, where rigor lives in the research design and the human judgment calls, and AI is used to scale synthesis, not to replace the thinking. Building websites is no different: the vision is the hard part, and it stays human.