Building websites in the AI era

That has consequences for how you build, not just what you build.

Faster, but not sloppier

AI makes writing code faster. That's no secret anymore. A component, an API route, a styling pass. Minutes instead of hours.

But speed without structure leads to mess. We see sites pop up that look fine but collapse the moment scope grows.

The question isn't whether you use AI, but how. A few rules that work for us:

AI writes, human decides. Architecture, data model and core logic stay human. What AI gets to do: implementation work, repetition and boilerplate.

Tests aren't optional. Code generated fast needs to be checked fast. Otherwise you're just shifting the problem.

Understand what you're letting it write. Code you can't explain is code you can't maintain.

Rendering for today's visitors

We've written before about two kinds of visitors: humans and machines. For building, that comes down to one concrete choice.

Render server-side, or at minimum make sure your content is available without JavaScript execution.

Pure client-side rendering looks fine to humans. To an AI crawler, your site is effectively empty. Nothing to index, nothing to cite, no you in the answer.

SSR, prerendering and static generation aren't technical luxuries anymore. They're your ticket onto the AI web.

Performance as a design principle

PageSpeed scores sound boring, but they're a very reliable proxy for quality. Slow sites lose users, ranking and crawl budget.

What we ship by default in every build:

• images in modern formats, lazy loaded, sized correctly
• animations the browser can composite, not ones that trigger repaints
• minimal render-blocking, critical CSS inline
• font loading that doesn't cause layout shift

None of this is new. What's new is that it's no longer optional.

A CMS that fits how we work now

We like working with Sanity. Not because it's trendy, but because it fits how we build.

Content stays structured and reusable. The editor has real control. Our code stays clean. AI tools can read along more easily because the data itself is logical.

Sounds small, but the difference between a CMS that imposes structure on you and a CMS that supports your structure is huge.

What stays

Despite all the shifts, one thing holds. A site is a product, not a project.

It gets built, launched and then used for years. AI speeds up the making, not the thinking. Good architecture, clear content and a brand that stands for something: those are still what set work apart.

The rest is tooling.