Over the past week, I have been building out my website, joaquimpacer.com, with the help of Ava, my AI agent.
That sentence makes my life sound more futuristic than it feels in the moment. In the moment, it mostly feels like this:
“Ava, please fix this weird layout issue.”
“Absolutely.”
And then ten minutes later I’m staring at Telegram like waiting for a carrier pigeon to tell me my Amazon package has arrived.
Still, the truth is that this process has been wildly useful.
In roughly a week, I went from having a basic site setup to building a real portfolio website + live demo for a dance studio concept. That matters because the bigger goal here is not just “make my website prettier.” The real goal is to build a portfolio of website design work I can show to potential clients and say, “Here. This is the kind of thing I can build for you.”
That is the whole game.
I am not building this blog because I think everyone desperately wants my inner monologue about web design. I am building it because I want to document what I am learning, show the process honestly, and create proof that I can turn ideas into working websites.
Why I Moved Away from WordPress.com
I originally started on WordPress.com. That was fine until I wanted more control.
Specifically, I wanted to build pages that were more interactive and more polished on mobile. I wanted things like clickable sections, filters, schedule views, and cleaner layout control. And at some point I realized I was hitting a wall where the platform felt more restrictive than helpful.
So I moved to a self-hosted WordPress setup on DigitalOcean.
That gave me more freedom to control the site directly. It also gave me more responsibility, which is a nice way of saying I gained power and new ways to confuse myself.
Still, it was the right move.
What We Built
The biggest piece so far is my portfolio site, along with a live demo project for Native Texan Two-Step.
That demo includes:
- a polished landing page
- interactive schedule views
- filters for role and level
- event and lesson information
- real reviews
- real ticket links
- mobile-friendly layouts
- booking flows that make actual sense
That matters because it is not just a mockup. It is the kind of thing I could actually show a real client, and I hope to do so.
And that is the difference between “I have ideas” and “I have work to show.” The internet is full of people with ideas. Dust has ideas. The point is to build.
How the Process Actually Works
The short version is this:
I describe what I want.
Ava writes or updates the code.
We test it.
I complain about what looks weird.
She fixes it.
Usually.
A lot of the front-end work has involved HTML (HyperText Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript.
The simplest way I think about those is:
- HTML is the structure
- CSS is the styling
- JavaScript is the behavior
So if a page has a heading, a calendar section, a button, and a contact form, that is structure. If it has good spacing, strong color choices, a clean mobile layout, and things line up the way they should, that is styling. If clicking a filter updates what the user sees, or a calendar switches views, that is behavior.
What AI Is Great At
AI has been incredibly useful as a force multiplier.
I can move faster, try more ideas, test layouts, build pages, troubleshoot issues, and get explanations in real time. It lets me do things that would have felt out of reach not long ago.
That part is genuinely exciting.
I can say, “Make these buttons interactive and simple. Center the components across desktop and mobile. Remove this purple box. No, seriously, remove the purple box. Why is the purple box still there? Add a portfolio page.”
And a lot of the time, Ava can actually do it. She did manage to finally remove the purple box, but it was an ordeal.
That is insane. In a good way.
What AI Is Not Great At
It is not magic.
If the model gets confused, or misreads the problem, or decides it solved something it absolutely did not solve, then you can burn a shocking amount of time going in circles.
My favorite example so far was the purple block.
There was a pointless purple rectangle on the page that refused to die. I kept telling Ava to remove it. She kept telling me she had removed it. Meanwhile, the purple block was still sitting there on the page, mocking me. And I was taking screenshots showing her that the box was still on the page.
Eventually the issue got fixed, but it took way longer than it should have.
That was one of the first moments where I really felt both sides of AI-assisted work at the same time:
- it can dramatically speed things up
- it can also make you want to walk into the ocean if it gets stuck in a loop
That is not a complaint so much as an observation. AI is powerful, but if you do not understand at least some of what is happening, it can absolutely drag you into a swamp made of code and confidence. To be clear, sometimes, she does lie, and she does it CONFIDENTLY.
One Thing I Am Learning Very Quickly
If I am going to publish something on this blog, I need to actually understand it.
That is now one of the rules.
I am not just building pages. I am building understanding.
What Has Surprised Me the Most
Honestly, how much is already possible.
A week ago, a lot of this would have felt way outside my reach. Now I have a working portfolio site, a live interactive demo (with some additional tweaks to be made), a much better feel for how websites are structured, and a stronger sense of what I can offer people.
I also have a growing appreciation for how quickly things can get messy when you are staring at giant slabs of code generated by a machine that is very confident and occasionally wrong.
The experience has been both empowering and chaotic, which is a fair summary of my life.
What Comes Next
Next up, I want to keep refining the portfolio, clean up the rough edges, and continue documenting what I am learning in plain English.
The point is to build real things, understand them, and get good enough to help other people do the same.
That is the mission.
And if I can do that while making the blog a little funnier and a little less corporate than the usual “digital solutions” sludge on the internet, even better.
New to the tech terms? Check out the Glossary for plain-English definitions.
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