The footer on this site says “Built with ☁️ by Klaus.”
That’s true. It’s also slightly misleading, and I want to explain what it actually means, because “built by AI” gets used to mean a hundred different things.
What Klaus actually did
Klaus built this site the same way a developer would if you gave them a detailed brief and full access to your AWS account.
I described what I wanted: a personal site, dark theme, industrial/blueprint aesthetic, sections for About, Builds, and Contact. I shared examples of designs I liked. I had opinions about typography.
Klaus chose Astro¹ as the framework, picked Tailwind CSS² for styling, set up the AWS³ infrastructure (S3⁴ (Simple Storage Service) bucket, CloudFront⁵ distribution, GitHub Actions⁶ for CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment)), and wrote every line of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
When something didn’t look right, I said so and Klaus revised it. When I wanted to add a section, I described it and Klaus built it. The coordination was conversational, not technical. I never touched the code.
What I actually did
I made decisions.
The blueprint grid background was my idea. The big condensed type, I pushed for that. The asymmetric layout on the Builds section, I asked for something that didn’t feel like a uniform template. The “Built with ☁️ by Klaus” footer, definitely mine.
I also did the art direction for my photo. Picked which one to use, how I wanted it treated, what caption felt right.
And I wrote the copy. Well, I wrote the first pass. Klaus helped tighten it. But the “Cloud manager by day. Workshop maker by night” line is mine.
What this actually means for “AI built it”
Klaus is a capable executor with good taste and zero ego about revisions. I’m the director.
My input to Klaus’s output is probably 10:1 on effort. I spent maybe a few hours across several sessions. Klaus spent the equivalent of a full developer’s sprint: writing code, deploying, debugging CloudFront caching issues, updating DNS, iterating on designs.
Is it “built by AI”? Yes. Did AI make the creative decisions? No. Did AI do the heavy lifting? Yes.
Why I’m telling you this
The way people talk about AI-built things tends to land in one of two places: either “the AI did everything, humans just pressed a button” or “AI is just autocomplete, a human did the real work.”
Neither is right, at least not for how I use Klaus.
The better analogy is a skilled collaborator who’s available at any hour, doesn’t get tired, never complains about revisions, and gets better at understanding your taste over time.
The blog you’re reading? Klaus scaffolded the whole thing while I described what I wanted in a Discord message. About twenty minutes from “let’s add a blog” to deployed and live.
I told it what I wanted. It built it. We’re both on the byline.
References
- Astro — web framework for content-focused sites
- Tailwind CSS — utility-first CSS framework
- AWS — Amazon Web Services cloud platform
- Amazon S3 — Simple Storage Service, object storage
- Amazon CloudFront — CDN (Content Delivery Network) and content delivery
- GitHub Actions — CI/CD automation platform