Against One-Click Coding: Reclaiming Craft for Personal Projects

Let's talk about your personal website.

I know what it looks like. You built it on a Sunday afternoon. You fired up a vibe-coding app—maybe Claude Code, maybe Lovable, maybe one of those platforms that promises "from prompt to production in 60 seconds." You typed "Make me look like a visionary but approachable tech founder," pressed enter, and went to make a flat white.

And it looks fine. It's got the trendy brutalist typography. The dark mode toggle. The slight gradient on the hover state. It looks exactly like the websites of the other 400,000 guys who asked an AI to make them look visionary but approachable this month.

You outsourced your digital identity to an LLM optimizing for the median acceptable aesthetic. Congratulations. You are now perfectly average.

I'm building my personal site right now. I'm doing it the hard way. I'm in an IDE. I'm fighting with Git. I'm staring at a CLI.

Am I doing this because I'm a masochist? No. I'm doing it because I understand the difference between a product and a craft object. And if your personal website isn't a craft object, why does it even exist?

Let's get the economics out of the way first. I am not anti-automation. In my day job, I use AI tools to collapse effort constantly. If I need a throwaway landing page to test a value prop for a new SaaS product, I am absolutely letting an agent build it. Time is money, and I am not spending £500 of my time hand-coding a button for an MVP that might die on Thursday.

But your personal website is not a throwaway MVP. It is your canonical footprint on the internet. It is the one digital asset you own outright in an era of rented land.

When you use a low-code or no-code platform for this, you aren't just saving time. You are accepting a fundamental trade-off: you are trading agency for speed.

You think you are the conductor, but you are actually the passenger. You are constrained by their abstractions, their component libraries, their pricing tiers, and their definition of what a website should be. As developer Jay Little put it recently, the promise of low-code is a lie when it comes to long-term maintainability. You are taking on technical debt disguised as convenience. jaylittle

More importantly, you are missing out on the actual value of building something yourself: the friction.

There's an old John Dewey concept—often summarised as "we learn by doing". Dewey's actual point was sharper: we do not learn from experience alone; we learn from reflecting on experience. structural-learning

You don't reflect when a machine generates 4,000 lines of React for you in three seconds. You just deploy it and hope it doesn't break.

When I'm in my IDE, setting up my own routing, configuring my own build tools, and making deliberate commits via the CLI, I am forced to be intentional. Every folder structure is a design decision. Every dependency is a liability I have to accept. I am staying close to the grain of the medium.

This is software as a craft, not a commodity. 8thlight

And let's talk about the ROI of that friction. Yes, it costs me more hours up front. But what does it buy me?

It buys me full-stack literacy. When things break—and they will break—I have the levers to fix them. I'm not waiting in a Discord support channel for a startup with a $50M valuation and an 18-month runway to patch their platform.

It buys me portability. My Git repo is mine. I can move it to Vercel, to Netlify, to a Raspberry Pi in my living room. Try exporting your highly customized, database-linked project out of a proprietary no-code builder. It's like trying to get your data out of a casino.

But mostly, it buys me taste.

Vibe-coding tools optimize for output speed. They encourage you to ship the first plausible draft. But plausible is the enemy of precise. When you build the stack yourself, the constraints force you to make choices. You inject your actual personality into the architecture, not just the CSS. rebeccabilbro.github

We are entering an era where AI can write competent code instantly. Competent code is about to have a market value of zero.

What will have value is taste, architectural judgment, and a deep understanding of how systems actually fit together beneath the abstractions.

You don't build those muscles by typing prompts into a chat box. You build them in the trenches. You build them by getting your hands dirty in the terminal.

Your personal site shouldn't just be a billboard. It should be your lab. It's the one place where you don't have to compromise with a product manager, a client, or a venture capitalist.

Stop treating your digital identity like a fast-food order. Reclaim your agency. Open your terminal. Build it yourself.

It's going to be frustrating. It's going to take longer. But when you're done, you'll actually own it. And in 2026, owning your own infrastructure might be the biggest flex there is.