KeepsakeBlog · July 2026
Building a website with your AI agent
You can have a real website by the end of the afternoon. Not the website-builder kind built from a template, but your own pages, built to your description, sitting in a folder on your computer. This is a walkthrough of how that goes in practice, including the part where the agent breaks something and you calmly put it back.
What you need
Two things. An AI agent that can work on the files on your computer: Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Gemini, Cursor, and Windsurf all do this. If you don’t have one yet, Claude Code is a good place to start, and its desktop app is the least technical way in.
And Keepsake, so every good version of your site becomes a save point you can go back to. Download Keepsake, then set up your agent. Both take a couple of minutes.
Start by asking
Make a new folder for the project and open it in your agent. Opening a folder is usually the first thing an agent asks you to do when it starts. Then brief it the way you’d brief a person. A good first message looks like this:
I run a small pottery studio. I’d like a website: a home page with photos, a page listing my classes with prices, and a way for people to contact me.
One day I’d like people to book classes and pay online. We don’t need that yet, but keep it in mind.
I’d also like to put this website online with Vercel later, so please build it in a way that works well with that.
And keep it as simple as you can, don’t add anything we don’t need yet.
The first paragraph describes the site you want today. The other three steer decisions the agent would otherwise guess at. It cannot read your mind, and some guesses are hard to walk back.
The booking sentence lets the agent leave room for that feature instead of tearing the site up later. When that day comes, logins and payments bring more moving parts, so expect smaller steps. Vercel is the service we’ll use to put the site on the internet at the end, and some ways of building a website suit it better than others. Asking for simplicity keeps the agent away from heavy professional tools. A simple site breaks less and is easier to change safely.
One thing to expect while it works: the agent will stop and ask permission before it installs tools or runs anything on your computer. That’s normal. Read what it’s asking, and say yes when the reason makes sense to you.
A few minutes later:
Built it. Three simple pages, with placeholder photos where yours will go. I’ve left room for booking to come later, and the site is ready for Vercel whenever you want to go live.
Want me to open it in your browser so you can take a look?
It’s usually most of the way there. The wording will be a bit generic and the photos won’t be yours yet, but the bones are real: pages you can click through in your own browser.
Save it before you improve it
One habit separates a fun afternoon from a frustrating one. The moment the site is in a good state, save it. With Keepsake set up, that’s one sentence in the same conversation:
A snapshot is a save point. Keepsake keeps a copy of the whole project exactly as it is right now, and you can return to it whenever you like. It costs you nothing to make one, so make them often.
Change things without worrying
Now push on it. Drop your real photos into the project folder and tell the agent which page each one belongs on. Rewrite the class descriptions. Try a different layout if you’re curious. Some requests will make the site better. Some won’t. And once in a while, one will quietly break a page.
Nobody had to work out why the classes page went blank. You didn’t explain what went wrong, and you didn’t wait while the agent tried to untangle its own work. The save point put the site back exactly as it was. From there you just repeat: ask for a change, look at it, and either save it or go back.
Putting it online
So far the site only exists on your computer. Getting it on the internet is one more ask. Vercel hosts sites like this for free, and because you mentioned it in your first message, the site is already built to suit it:
One tip: take a snapshot right before a version goes online and give it a name like “First live version”. Later, when you’ve been experimenting, you’ll always know exactly which save point the internet is seeing.
The address ends in vercel.app for now. When you’d rather have your own, like potterystudio.com, that’s one more ask. The agent can help you buy the name and connect it to your site.
From here the site is yours to grow. Add a page for the summer schedule, or let the agent talk you into something strange on a rainy day. If it goes badly, you go back. The version you already like is never at risk.