Why I Used AI to Build My Website [Series Part 1]
How I decided to break free from platform dependency and build my own site using AI. Lessons learned from past experiences and my encounter with Claude Code.
Introduction
When you want to create a website or blog, what approach do you take? Which platform do you use?
There are plenty of popular blogging platforms to choose from — WordPress, Medium, Substack, and many others depending on your region. But regardless of which platform you pick, if you're thinking about AdSense, you inevitably have to consider ad monetization.
The Risk of Platform Dependency
I used to run a blog on one of the most popular platforms in Korea. I had around 2,000 daily visitors on average, and things were going well — until the platform started changing its policies. These changes kept making things worse for content creators.
After several rounds of instability, I decided, "I can't keep running my blog here," and I stopped publishing altogether.
Content Lost Forever
Looking back, I could have easily migrated to my own domain today. But at the time, I didn't have that knowledge, so migrating my blog while keeping everything intact was impossible. I ended up losing all my content.
After that, between a busy work life and various life events, blogging gradually faded into the background — just something I "used to do."
Meeting AI and Starting Over
But then the AI wave hit, and everything changed when I discovered Claude Code. Suddenly I thought, "Wait — maybe it's worth giving this another shot?"
With Claude Code, I could spin up the site I wanted in a single day, and with a few more days of polish, end up with something genuinely impressive — I saw it happen with my own eyes.
That reignited the desire to take all those content ideas I'd been carrying around in my head and put them back out into the world. So I started spending 2-3 hours after work each evening building a blog site and running it again.
(For the record, that blog isn't this one. That one is a Korean-language information site.)
Why AI Instead of WordPress?
Using AI to build my site was great because I could make it exactly the way I envisioned.
I considered going with WordPress, but that would still mean learning a new system, configuring everything from scratch, and ultimately depending on yet another platform. No matter how much freedom it offers, there's still a dependency.
Having been burned so badly before, I wanted full ownership of everything.
So I teamed up with AI tools (Gemini, Claude Code, ChatGPT), built my site, started running it again, and got AdSense approved once more.
Next Up
In the next post, I'll share the actual process of how I used AI to build the site.