From zero to live: building my own website with AI

I'm a surgery resident, not a programmer. A few weeks ago I had never written a line of code or built anything that lived on the internet. This is the story of how I went from that to a real site on my own domain — and the parts that genuinely surprised me.

The first decision wasn't technical

Before any of the building, I had to figure out what the site should even say about me. My instinct was to lean hard into "AI," because I find it fascinating. But I'm not building AI — I'm a doctor who's curious about it. Claiming more than that would have felt hollow, and people see through it.

So the first lesson came before a single design choice: figure out who you actually are, and don't oversell it. We landed on something simple and honest — a resident who cares about doing the work well and pays attention to where medicine and AI are headed. Less impressive on paper, more true. I'll take true.

The tool builds; the judgment stays yours

From there, the AI did the heavy lifting — the design, the layout, the code I couldn't have written myself. But every meaningful choice was still mine: the tone, what to include, what to cut, which photos, how to describe my research without exaggerating it.

Building with AI doesn't remove the need for judgment. It concentrates it.

I spent my time deciding, not typing. Is this sentence honest? Is this section bragging? Does this read like a person or a brochure? That's the actual work now, and it turns out it's work no tool can do for you, because it depends on knowing yourself.

Going live was the anticlimactic part

Publishing was almost too easy — you drag a folder onto a free host and suddenly there's a link anyone in the world can open. Then a custom domain, which is what made it feel real. There were hiccups along the way (photos that didn't upload the first time, a domain to configure), but none of it ever required me to understand the code underneath.

What I took away

You don't need to be technical to put yourself online anymore. You need to know what you want to say, be honest about it, and be willing to make a hundred small decisions well. The technology has quietly become the easy part. The judgment — that's still the job, and it's still yours.