A Digital Strategy Podcast

Building With AI. The Part Nobody Sells You

Episode Summary

About eight months ago we lost a project. A founder told us they'd built their new website themselves, with AI. Faster, cheaper, hard to argue with. Eight months later the site still hadn't shipped. Same old pages, zero updates. They didn't save money, they spent eight months running a business on a site that had already stopped working. In this episode, Symon and Marcello unpack the part nobody sells you: "I built it with AI" isn't one thing, it's three completely different paths, and the risk changes depending on which one you're actually on. We both use these tools every day, so this isn't an anti-AI take. It's the more useful one: AI collapsed the cost of making things and left the cost of knowing what to make exactly where it was.

Episode Notes

💡 Key Topics:

• Why "I built it with AI" is three different builds (pure generated code, CMS with an AI layer, headless + AI front end) with three different risk profiles
• Path one's trap: no content layer, so editing isn't editing anymore, it's regenerating the whole site from scratch
• The security roll of the dice: Veracode found roughly half of AI-generated code came back secure (55% one year, 56% the next) on blind prompts with no security instructions
• Your website is a regulated surface: Ontario's AODA and WCAG 2 AA, the US ADA, and why "I built it in a weekend" is not a compliance strategy
• Path two's real risk isn't what the AI writes, it's handing a model write access to your live production site instead of staging with a human approving
• Why the difference was never the tool, it's the operator: knowing which defaults to override, how to isolate a change so one button doesn't rewrite the whole site
• "Make me a website" versus a real pipeline, and why garbage in still means garbage out
• The one test to run this week: can anyone in the loop actually validate what came back?

📖 Chapters:

• 0:00 — We lost the project: eight months, no website
• 0:59 — The question: what do you actually walk away with?
• 1:34 — Three paths, and they're not equally dangerous
• 1:37 — Path one: pure generated code, security and legal exposure
• 4:01 — Path two: a real CMS with an AI layer
• 5:07 — Path three: headless CMS and AI front end
• 6:26 — The difference was never the tool, it's the operator
• 8:52 — "Make me a website": what that actually means
• 10:52 — What to do this week: can anyone validate it?
• 11:31 — Where AI actually belongs

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