I've been thinking about something Poul mentioned recently: the cost of building websites has fundamentally changed.
Last week, I was using Bolt.new to sketch some ideas. Started with one prompt. Then another. Then I thought — what if I just... generated ten different versions in parallel?
So I did. Ten website drafts. Ten different directions. Ten separate A/B test candidates. Total cost? Around $2 in API tokens. Time? Less than 10 minutes.
The wild part isn't the cost. It's what this means for how we think about design and product development.
Before this, you'd pick a direction. Build it. Hope it was right. Maybe iterate later. Now? You can generate 10 completely different takes on the same idea and let the market (or your users, or your gut) tell you which vibe resonates.
The drafts I made were all legit:
- The Thoughtful Minimalist — stripped-back, lots of white space, serif fonts
- The Personal Story Teller — narrative-heavy, warm colors, conversational
- The Professional Portfolio — clean grid, dark mode, showcasing work
- The Community Hub — social features baked in, lots of visual hierarchy
- The Indie Hacker — technical, open-source vibes, documentation-first
- The Startup Energy — bold colors, animations, modern sans-serif
- The Knowledge Base — search-optimized, link-rich, wiki-like
- The Lifestyle Brand — Instagram aesthetic, aspirational
- The Newsletter Archive — email-first, long-form content focus
- The Experimental Lab — WebGL background, interactive, eye-catching
Each one is actually usable. Each one took 30-60 seconds.
This changes the economics of product development. This changes how you validate ideas. This changes whether you even need to commit to a single design direction at the start.
I'm not saying the AI wrote perfect code. But it wrote good enough code. And good enough code at $0.20 per iteration is basically free compared to the traditional developer cost.
My 20 years in this industry taught me that design decisions are expensive because iteration is expensive. Now iteration is free. That changes everything.
The question isn't "Can AI build websites?" anymore.
The question is: "How do I rethink product development when I can generate infinite variations?"
Starting this 100-day journey to document what's happening to developers right now. We're not just getting better tools. We're getting different economics. Different workflows. Different possibilities.
🎙️ Hear more about this topic — I talked about my early AI coding stack and the 100x developer concept on Verbos Podcast #76. → Listen to the episode