There’s a particular irony in being a technology consultant. You spend years walking into boardrooms telling CEOs that AI will change everything — then go home to a LinkedIn profile untouched since 2019.
So. I finally ate my own cooking.
The brief I gave Claude was dangerously vague: “Build me a blog. Make it look like Apple designed it. Fast. Clean. No servers.” Twenty years of enterprise architecture experience, distilled into the most underspecified product brief imaginable.
It just… started building.
The stack — and yes, most of it is free:
- Hugo — open source, builds 45 pages in 19 milliseconds. Not a typo.
- Decap CMS — open source, Git-based headless CMS. No database, no backend, no 3am alerts.
- GitHub Actions — free tier covers every push. Build, deploy, done.
- Cloudflare Pages — free tier: unlimited sites, 500 deploys/month, global CDN faster than most enterprise setups I’ve been paid real money to architect.
The only thing that costs money is the domain. Everything else: zero. Total monthly bill: ~$1/month. A managed WordPress setup with comparable performance runs $20–50. I’ve migrated enough of those to have strong opinions.
The AI pair-programming was fast and occasionally humbling. We shipped a custom theme, CMS integration, GA4 event tracking, and JSON-LD structured data in a single session. We also fought a CSS cache set to immutable — meaning “never check if this changed” — and watched the production site serve sepia-toned ghost styles for three deploys.
I have told clients about cache-busting strategies. In boardrooms. For money.
The mirror is uncomfortable. I recommend it anyway.
Find me on LinkedIn — link in the nav, as always.