If you spend any time around other creatives, you inevitably hear the exact same complaint:

"I just want to do my work. I don't want to have to promote it."

I get it. I feel the exact same way. Self-promotion often feels like a distraction, or worse, a chore. And to me, nothing is more of a chore than building and maintaining a website.

In this post, I want to show you how you can use AI to stand up a custom website to do that heavy lifting for you—without having to learn to code, so you can spend more time working on the stuff you actually care about.

It’s sad to say, but the reality is that having a website is still important in 2026. Despite my wishes otherwise, it is still one of the most important asset you can own. You need a place that anchors your identity on the internet—a room that you own, not one you’re renting (from an algorithm). And also, a place for nuanced discussion in a world increasingly polarized by social media algorithms and hate brigades.

But, building a website is a pain in the ass. And it's only gotten to be more of a pain in the ass as the years have gone on. We have to account for every type of device, the ever-shifting rules of SEO (now AEO), and the mounting complexity of modern code.

My first website goes back to 1994, when the web was still being figured out for the first time. Over the decades, I went from coding my own, to using WordPress, to finally giving in and using Squarespace for years—simply because I didn't want to deal with all the technical stuff anymore. I wanted an "easy button."

But when I set out to build The Daring Creatives, I knew I wasn't going to use an existing web platform. I wanted it to feel like a unique property, not a template. I wanted it to look and feel like a magazine. And I wanted to be as hands off as possible when it came to updating it.

To get there, the choice became clear: I was going to use AI to roll my own from the ground up.

Here is how you actually build your own room on the internet today, without the hassle, and without the agency bloat.

The "Magic Button" Myth

Before we get into the stack, we need to kill a popular myth. There is a narrative floating around that with AI, you just type one sentence and boom—you have a final, ready-to-sell website.

You should be highly skeptical of claims like this.

That narrative really pisses people off, especially gatekeepers. It assumes AI is just a shortcut for people trying to bypass effort. It doesn't work that way. At least for me, my process is highly iterative.

Granted, my prompts are often "trash"—I type exactly like I talk, undisciplined and raw. It’s amazing to me that the AI can make sense of what I write, but it does.

I don’t try to "one shot" a feature in a single prompt. I want to understand how the thing is working. When you use AI, you are training it, and it is training you. It doesn't have the context of the network errors on your screen or the rendering issues in your browser. You have to be the eyes for the machine. You have to be able to communicate what you see.

The Daring Creatives Recipe

You don’t need deep, specialized coding knowledge to build a custom website today. You just have to know the right questions to ask and how to layer your tools. Here is the exact recipe I use to keep the build effective and, more importantly, fun.

• The Foundation (Ghost CMS): I tried several options before landing on Ghost. Gemini actually suggested it because Ghost allows for updates via API. This is the secret sauce—it allows an AI agent to interact with the backend of your site directly, making it far more powerful than a closed "drag-and-drop" builder.
• The Architect (Warp & Anti-Gravity): I installed a terminal agent called Warp on my Mac, turned on some music late at night, and just started talking. At first, it was basic: “Can I make the fonts bigger? Can I change the colors?” Initially, I’d copy the code it gave me. But as trust was built, I let the AI write and manipulate the files itself. Now, I don't touch the code. I just describe the vision. Somewhere along the way, Warp outgrew me, so I pivoted to the mighty Antigravity (by Google) which is at least 200% better. Try it!
• The Brain (NotebookLM): I keep a categorized catalog of all my content as Markdown files in Notebook LM, which I can connect directly to Gemini. By creating separate notebooks for different parts of the site, I can "hand off" the specific context the AI needs to solve a problem without overwhelming it.
• The Optimizer (LLMs): I use Gemini 3.1 Pro to handle the "boring" work that kills creative momentum: 301 redirects, writing alt text for images I missed, and adding schema to the backend so Google understands the story I'm telling. I’m not just building for people; I’m optimizing for the machines that help people find me.

Just Ask the Question

I hate the standard way people create websites; most of them feel identical. To break that, I asked the AI: "What could we do that would be novel?" That question led to our "Mission Control" concept.

Now, when you're on the site, you can pull up a site map by hitting the 'M' key, or use arrow keys to fly through articles in the same category. People say AI can only copy what’s been done before, but I hadn't seen a navigation system that worked quite like that. It was born out of a collaboration between my "what if" and the machine's "how to."

If you’re going to attempt this, a few human skills matter more than any specific tool.

Curiosity beats credentials. You have to actually want to poke at things, ask dumb questions, and keep pulling threads when something half-works instead of giving up.

Taste matters. You don’t need to be a designer or an engineer, but you do need a point of view. If you can’t tell when something feels off, no amount of AI help will save you.

Clear communication is the multiplier. The better you can describe what you want, what you’re seeing, and what’s broken, the faster the machine becomes useful. This is less about “prompt engineering” and more about learning to articulate your intent.

And finally, patience.

This is not a one-shot magic trick. It’s a conversation. The people who get the most out of this stack are the ones willing to iterate, correct, and stay in the loop long enough for the system to start feeling like an extension of their own thinking. You can learn more about modern web design in a week of "Vibe Coding" than in months of traditional tutorials. By asking the AI to explain its steps, you get to watch its chain-of-thought reasoning in real-time.

You don’t need permission to build your own room anymore. You don’t need a massive budget or a computer science degree. You just need to be willing to sit down, start the conversation, and lead the machine toward the vision in your head.