I'm a CPA. I run a company. I am not a web developer — and last Tuesday, I stopped pretending that was a limitation.
Here's what happened.
I needed a new page on our website for women's testosterone therapy. We have a marketing manager. We have a Squarespace account. What we didn't have was a page that looked like it was built in the last year. Our existing pages were functional but flat — fine for 2019, less impressive in 2025.
A real developer would charge me $2,000 and takes two weeks. I had a few hours on a Tuesday night and zero patience for either.
So I opened Claude, described what I wanted — our brand colors, our fonts, the sections I needed, the message I was trying to convey — and I asked it to build me a page in HTML. Not a template. Not a drag-and-drop widget. Actual hand-coded HTML that I could drop directly into Squarespace's code block.
It worked. Completely. On the first try? No. But by the third iteration — after I described what looked off, what I wanted adjusted, what sections needed to move — I had a page good enough to share with my team that received only minor tweaks. Modern layout. Clean typography. Responsive on mobile. Brand-consistent. The kind of page you pay a freelancer to build.
I am not a developer. I cannot read HTML. I couldn't build that page myself if you gave me a week and a YouTube playlist. And it did not matter.
What this actually means.
This isn't a story about AI being magic. It's a story about the skill that matters now — which is knowing what you want clearly enough to describe it. It's the skill that lets you stop waiting on other people to move your business forward.
The bottleneck Tuesday night wasn't the AI. It was me getting precise about what I was asking for. The moment I started describing things specifically — "there's too much blank space at the bottom, the CTA button should be the green from our website not the navy, the testimonial section feels cluttered, remove the last icon" — the output got dramatically better.
That's a skill. Not a technical skill. A thinking skill. The ability to describe a problem clearly, evaluate a solution honestly, and iterate without ego.
I've found that most of the things I thought required specialists actually just require this: knowing what you want, being specific enough to ask for it, and persisting. That's true for AI. It's also true for hiring, for delegating, and for most of adult professional life.
The practical part.
If you want to try this yourself, here's exactly how I started:
Don't begin with "make me a website." Begin with a problem. "I need a one-page site that explains what I do, looks professional, and works on mobile. My audience is [X]. My brand colors are [Y]. Here's what I want each section to say." Give Claude (or Grok) some context, and the goal — and then treat the first output like a rough draft, not a finished product. Even better, upload a sample of your writing. Even a couple emails works.
Iterate out loud. Tell it what's wrong specifically. "The headline is too generic." "The layout feels cramped." "I want this section to come before that one." You're not writing code. You're directing a very fast, very patient builder who needs clear instructions. Not sure? Ask it for help.
The page is live at affinitywholehealth.com if you want to see what this looks like in practice.
The takeaway for this week:
Pick one thing at work or in your life that you've been putting off because you assumed it required a skill you don't have. A spreadsheet. A document. A process. A page. Spend 5 minutes describing it to an AI as if you were briefing a contractor, then 15 more grilling it. See what comes back. You'll either get 80% of the way there immediately — or at least you'll know exactly what you need to ask a human to do.
The bar for "I need a specialist" just moved. Most of us haven't updated our assumptions.
⚡ ONE MORE THING
If you're new to prompting AI for real work (not just answering questions), the single most useful habit is to add "ask me clarifying questions before you start" to the end of any prompt. It forces the AI to clarify what you want before it builds anything — and usually surfaces the thing you forgot to include.
— Matt
P.S. The background story here is that my marketing manager quit and I had to figure out how to build a web page myself. Sometimes the best forcing functions aren't the ones you choose.
