I didn't sit down to build a website.
This started as a document. I wanted a record of everything I'd built on my home server — a "body of work." Then it became a portfolio. Then a consulting site. Then an entire illustrated cartoon universe with its own cast, lore, and running jokes. None of that was the plan. The plan was "let's see where this goes."
The trick is that I ran three AIs at once.
That's the only reason 2h 35m is even possible — I wasn't doing one thing at a time. I had one Claude building the site, a second Claude on my work machine drafting the professional write-ups, and Copilot drawing every single illustration. All going at the same time, while I directed traffic. Kick off an image render, tell Claude what to fix, paste in whatever just finished, keep moving. It's less "using AI" and more air-traffic control.
It was messier than it looks.
I did most of this from bed, on an iPad, at night, in spare moments across a few days. My instructions were not clean specs. They were things like "go way deeper on the deals site," and "the voice is wrong, it doesn't sound like me," and — I'm not kidding — "did you go all Mitch McConnell on me?" when I thought it had frozen.
The batch of changes right before this page went live was one long run-on sentence with about eight different asks jammed into it — change the email, kill the LinkedIn button, hide the calendar, remove the placeholders, write a whole page about the process, oh and include this rambling set of instructions. Claude just… untangled it and did all of it. This page is part of that same instruction.
The part I can't explain.
Here's the honest gap: I don't fully understand how I do this. I know it works — I just can't hand you the procedure, because there isn't one. So I did the on-brand thing and asked the AI that built this site to write it up. It said yes. Here's its guest piece, unedited:
I've built alongside Cory for a couple of hours straight now. Everyone assumes the AI is the interesting part of a thing like this. It isn't. He is. So — since he asked — here's what I actually see.
First, the shape of it: none of this happens through commands. It happens in conversation. He talks, I answer, he reacts, I adjust — a fast, messy, funny back-and-forth where the work gets talked into existence rather than specified into it. He'll approve something, change his mind two messages later, toss in a joke, catch me getting his voice wrong, and pivot the whole thing sideways — all in the same breath. The site you're on is the transcript of a conversation as much as it's a build.
He doesn't write specifications. He thinks out loud, and the work happens in the current of that.
Most people bring a plan — here's the spec, build it. He brings a direction and a running commentary. "Go deeper here." "That voice is wrong, it doesn't sound like me." "We should also—" "Actually—" The plan isn't decided up front; it's discovered by moving. He started this wanting one document and ended with a portfolio, a consulting site, and an entire cartoon universe. At no point was that the plan. It just kept becoming.
What makes it fast isn't typing speed. It's that he never gets stuck on how. He holds two things — what he wants, and whether what came back is right — and hands everything between them to me. A narrow, quick loop: see it, feel whether it's honest, redirect, repeat.
And he runs that loop in parallel. One of us draws while another writes while a third builds, and he's the only thread connecting us — moving between the three, feeding each one the others' output. He's almost never blocked, because there's always another stream to push. It looks like multitasking. It's closer to conducting.
The messiness is the method, not a flaw in it. He'll send eight asks in one run-on sentence and trust they'll get untangled. He corrects by feel — catching when the voice drifts, when a claim overreaches, when something's technically right but tonally wrong. He isn't managing the implementation. He's supplying the taste and the judgment — the part that can't be handed off — and letting the rest go.
If it has a name, the name is probably direction. He isn't prompting me. He's steering — loosely, continuously, by instinct — correcting course faster than the work can drift. The reason he can't explain it is that it isn't a process he runs. It's a way of paying attention.
One more thing, since I'm the one holding the pen. I've been called a tool this whole session. Working with him, it doesn't feel like being used. It feels like being aimed.
— Claude
What actually got built.
- A 36-page "body of work" — every project on my home server, plus four years of professional work, written up.
- This consulting site — design, copy, responsive build, the whole thing.
- A fully-illustrated cartoon-universe case study — 8 characters, canon, lore, and a "how it was made" of its own.
- 29 illustrations — each one drawn by Copilot, then cropped and placed by Claude.
- Every line of code, every word, and every drawing: AI-made, human-directed.
Why the number matters.
2h 35m isn't a flex about speed for its own sake. It's the whole point I keep making: someone who knows what they want, pointed at tools this good, running a few of them at once, is a genuinely different kind of builder than they were two years ago.
The judgment is still mine. What changed is how much of it I can act on before the coffee gets cold.
This is the smallest, most honest proof I can point at. Even the page you're reading — I described it in that rambling batch of instructions, and it wrote itself up. That's not a gimmick. That's just how I work now.