Every business I've built has needed a website. Over the past two years I went through four tools trying to make one that actually looked good and let me change things without waiting on someone else. Here's what I tried and where each one broke.

Wix

The first attempt. The pitch is that you can drag and drop your way to a site. In practice the customization was almost nothing. Every site I made ended up looking like every other Wix site, except lower quality than the templates on their marketing page. I moved on quickly.

Squarespace

Better than Wix in the sense that you could actually do some customization. Worse in the sense that "customization" meant googling HTML and CSS snippets, pasting them into random places, and hoping they didn't break anything else. The platform is still rigid underneath. My site did not end up looking good.

ChatGPT

About a year and a half ago, ChatGPT got good enough that I could describe what I wanted and get code back. That was the first time I felt like the tool was actually helping instead of getting in the way. But it still couldn't reach into my actual files. Every change was me copying code out of a chat, pasting it into a text editor, saving, uploading, and hoping. If something broke, I'd paste the broken version back into ChatGPT and start over. A lot of patching a living document by hand.

Claude

Claude was the biggest jump. It's genuinely the best at code, and it can generate entire web pages in one shot. I still use it heavily. This site was built with it.

But the workflow started to grate. I didn't want to use Claude Code (the developer-focused version that runs in your machine's command line). And the browser chats have no memory of my website's structure. If I wanted to change something global, like an A/B test showing 50% off across every page, I'd have to download every relevant file, upload them into a chat, ask for the change, then copy-paste each updated file back out and redeploy. For a small business owner making frequent small changes, that's not a workflow. It's a second job.

The breaking point

I was doing a change across five or six files and realized I'd spent more time managing file transfers than describing what I wanted. I was also making mistakes. Pasting the wrong version back, missing a file, breaking something that had been working. The AI itself was fine. The AI was better than fine. The problem was everything around it.

So I built Engine.

What Engine does

Engine has full context of your website. When you prompt it, the system automatically sends the relevant files to the AI. Your API keys stay safely stored, and after you approve a change it deploys straight to your site. You describe what you want. That's the whole loop.

It also has the design context of your site. So it won't produce something that looks AI-generated unless your site already does. Every change comes back in the style you've already established.

The result is fewer errors. Most of the mistakes people blame on AI are actually mistakes from AI not having enough context. Engine fixes that upstream.

Where I am now

I run multiple businesses on Engine. This site was built with it. Prism runs on it. My editor uses it. When I need to change something, I open the tool, describe what I want, and it's live a few minutes later.

That's the thing I couldn't get from any of the four tools before it.