I rebuilt my website and AI did most of the heavy lifting

A new, improved version of sugarollymountain.com is live. Go have a look and tell me what you think.

The original site: a Wix-shaped regret

I built the original website in the gap between leaving BHP and joining Acquire, at a point where I was convinced I wanted to be a consultant. Honestly? I wanted to be a Selwyn D'Souza, jetting into Perth for a C-suite innovation strategy session before flying back to my yacht in Sydney. (To be fair to Selwyn, I have no idea if that's actually his life, but it made for a great fantasy.)

The site was thrown together quickly using Wix, and I never really liked it. Once I joined Acquire, it got even less love. It sat there quietly gathering digital dust for years.

So why rebuild it now?

Two reasons. Both of them are AI.

Reason 1: building an AI-powered development pipeline

I've been wanting to test how far I could push AI across the full Software Development Lifecycle, not just using it to write a bit of code here and there, but integrating it into every stage of how a piece of software goes from an idea to something live in the world.

The tool doing the heavy lifting throughout is Claude (Anthropic's AI). The short version of why: Claude is exceptionally good at holding context across a long, complex conversation. When you're building software, that matters enormously. You're not asking a single question, you're having an ongoing dialogue where the AI needs to understand what you've already built, what you're trying to achieve, and why a particular approach makes sense.

Here's roughly how the pipeline works:

What surprised me most was how fast this came together. There's a learning curve. If you get the foundations wrong early, you will spend time unwinding it. But once the pieces clicked, the pace at which I could build things changed dramatically.

The website was just the most visible output. Programming projects that had been sitting half-finished for months are now done. New ideas that I'd mentally shelved as "too much effort for one person" are now genuinely viable.

Reason 2: it's genuinely a lot of fun

Being able to operate as a solo developer and ship in a weekend what used to take weeks is incredibly liberating. There's something about having a capable collaborator available at any hour, who never loses patience and never needs context re-explained from scratch, that changes how you approach building things.