I parked my domain for 3 years. An AI agent built the site in a day

I bought matteocastellani.com three years ago. Then I did nothing with it.

The domain sat parked because I kept pushing the website to “later”. I had two reasons.

First, I didn’t know what the site was supposed to be about.

Second, I have no design experience. Every time I started, I got stuck at the same point: I don’t know how it should look, and even if I knew, I don’t know CSS well enough to build it. I also hate debugging CSS.

So the domain stayed empty.

What changed the day I built it

That day I listened to an episode of The Side Hustle Show with a guest who runs a one-person AI automation agency for small teams. His customers are small business owners who feel overwhelmed by their workload, and they see him as their biggest help.

That is a job I want to do. I had been struggling to say what I wanted to sell, and the episode made it clear: I help owners of small businesses get repetitive work off their plate with AI.

It also gave me something for my biggest fear, which is selling. I messaged him and asked how he got past it. He told me unselling is easier than selling. Everyone gets sold to all day, so the person who talks straight stands out. And buying is a pleasant thing: you have a need, someone who knows their stuff gives you clarity, and you want to work with them. Selling is just that in reverse.

My fear is also about not delivering on my promises, even though my career says I can. Seeing it his way made it smaller.

And I finally knew what the site was about. I wasn’t staring at an empty page asking “what do I write?” I was writing for one specific person.

I didn’t write the code. I described what I wanted to Claude Code and read what came back. Most of the work happened in a single day.

What I got wrong

I couldn’t choose a design

I had Claude build four different designs, and I couldn’t decide between them. I went around in circles. In the end I admitted that a live website beats a perfect one that doesn’t exist. I picked one, and the site went out.

I started without a way to work from anywhere

At first, Claude Code only worked when I was sitting at my computer, because I had no server at home. Then I took the time to set one up: an old laptop that stays on, which I reach from my phone through Claude Code’s Remote Control. Now I write what I want, look at a preview link, and say publish, from wherever I am. I should have done this first, not last.

The agent told me something that wasn’t true

It said, with full confidence, that my new site was already deployed, because the site deploys on every merge to main. It wasn’t. I had set up nothing in Cloudflare yet, so there was nothing to deploy to. Now I ask it to show me the live URL before I believe it.

What made it easy

The site is a static Astro site that deploys to Cloudflare when I push to GitHub. The folder has a short instructions file that says what the site is for, plus a few shortcuts I gave the agent: draft a post from my notes, preview, publish, and write the LinkedIn post that links back to the article.

But the setup wasn’t what helped most. My notes were already in order.

A while ago I started keeping everything in one place. I talk to Wispr Flow and it turns my thoughts into text. They live in Obsidian, and Claude links and cleans them up. I wrote about that setup on LinkedIn.

So the agent could read my strategy, my drafts and my ideas. Creating content got a lot easier, and the ideas I had carried around for years were finally written down where I could find them. That helped me get unstuck.

No more technical decisions

In the past, starting a website meant making a pile of technical decisions before I could begin. Which framework? Which hosting? How should it be structured? Every choice felt permanent, because changing it later meant a lot of work.

Now I know that whatever I choose, I can change it easily, because a coding agent does the work. If the framework turns out wrong, I swap it. If the structure doesn’t fit, I restructure it. So I stopped getting stuck on technical questions.

What’s left are the questions that matter: what is this site for, who is it for, and what do I say to them? That is what AI agents free up for me. I no longer have to solve technical problems before I can get to the core ones.

It also took away my favorite excuse. For three years, “I don’t know the technical side” let me avoid the hard questions without admitting it. Now the technical problems are mostly gone, and I can’t hide behind them. The hard part is the content. It always was.

If you’re stuck like I was

For me the blocker was never the code. It was not knowing what I wanted, and not wanting to commit to a look. An agent doesn’t answer the first for you, but it makes trying cheap. It can’t choose the design either. You still have to pick one.

If a project of yours has been parked for years, ask whether a missing skill is what’s holding it back.