Just Build Your Website
Your online presence lives on someone else's platform. AI is making it easier than ever to change that.
LinkedIn owns your LinkedIn profile.
Meta owns your Instagram and Facebook.
Microsoft owns your GitHub account.
You can spend years building your presence online and the platform can restrict, modify, or delete it overnight. But beyond the ownership question, there’s something subtler going on: every account on these platforms looks more or less the same. You can change the contents and your profile picture, but the structure, the layout, the feel is fixed and the same for everyone. It belongs to the platform, not to you. And in this setting, you’re only ever telling part of your story.
Meanwhile, the world is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Products and services are always more customizable, personalized, unique. Think of iOS, even the conservative Apple now lets you customize your home screen down to individual icon packs. Spotify reshapes its entire interface around you: your homepage, your weekly mixes, your Daylist, no two users see the same product. Nike lets you design your own sneakers from scratch, down to the sole color, built on demand. And Large Language Models are now able to build entirely personalized apps or websites from instructions in natural language. The world is moving toward things that feel like yours, and yet your online identity still lives inside someone else’s boring template.
This isn’t just a feeling. According to a McKinsey report, 71% of consumers now expect personalized interactions as a baseline, and 76% say they get frustrated when that expectation isn’t met. Personalization is becoming the default standard; everywhere except, ironically, the profiles we use to represent ourselves online.
That’s why having a personal website still matters.
It’s the one corner of the internet you actually own. You decide the structure, the aesthetic, what goes where, what story you want to tell and how to tell it. It doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s.
And here comes the fun part. Building one has never been more accessible. You don’t even need to know how to write a single line of code¹. AI coding agents like Claude Code or OpenAI Codex can build a website for you: you bring the idea, the personality, the details you care about, and they handle the implementation. This is, I think, one of the real values of LLMs: offloading the mechanical and technical work so people can contribute what only they have: their creativity, ideas, personality. The result is software that feels more human than anything built by a model alone. And it’s yours.
I did exactly this. I spent the last weekends working with Claude Code, describing what I wanted, iterating on it, and it ended up being genuinely fun. The result is live here at enricozanetti.dev, my little (personalized) corner of the internet.
If you’ve been putting it off because it seemed too technical or too time-consuming, now might be the moment to reconsider. You already have everything you need to start. Just build your website.
¹ Mostly true, because let’s be honest, you’ll still need to figure out how to deploy a website and manage your code, which isn’t trivial. But building stuff is becoming always more accessible and in the meantime an LLM can walk you through that too.