BUILD | Artificial Intelligence
Building Without Permission
I spent twenty years pretending I knew how to build websites. I called it dabbling, but really I was just learning enough CSS to change a hex code or move a button three pixels to the left so I wouldn’t have to pay a developer a hundred and fifty dollars an hour to do it for me. I’ve been involved in thirty site launches with various brands across NetSuite, WordPress, and Shopify. The trajectory was always the same. The platforms got better, but the invoices got heavier and the timelines got longer.
A custom Shopify build for a new brand now starts at twenty-five thousand dollars and can easily hit six figures before you’ve sold a single thing.
It is a massive tax on a startup’s entry.
Two years ago, when I built my last company, we hired an agency and paid an exorbitant price because that was just the cost of doing business. It felt like an immutable law of the universe. It was the price you paid to avoid the "it can't be done" conversation that usually started around month three of a build. Then, almost overnight, the floor fell out of the development market.
I started using Claude to write liquid code for the Canard site. I’d upload a raw Illustrator or Figma file from our designers, describe how the hover state should feel in plain English, and wait ten seconds. It would spit out working code that I’d manually copy and paste into the Shopify editor. It was a clunky, repetitive workflow. If something broke, I’d take a screenshot, feed it back to the model, and try again.
It wasn't elegant. But it was working.
Then I discovered Cursor.
I spent twenty minutes last week linking a local GitHub repository to a code editor that actually has a brain. Now, instead of copy-pasting snippets like a digital scavenger, the AI has access to my entire codebase. I can ask it to add dynamic pricing to an add-to-cart button, and it doesn’t just give me the logic—it finds the four different files that need to change and rewrites them in real-time.
The friction didn't just decrease; it vanished.
The real benefit isn't just the money saved, it's the death of the phrase "it can't be done." For years, whenever I asked a developer for a specific feature, I was told it was impossible or too complex. What they usually meant was that the effort wasn't worth the billable hours. And they were probably right at the time.
But when you’re the one under the hood with a tool that understands the architectural debt of your site better than a human does, you realize how much was possible all along.
We’re no longer negotiating scope with third-party agencies. We’re just building.
I might be wrong about the long-term stability of this. Maybe I’m creating a technical debt monster that will come back to haunt me in eighteen months. Perhaps I'll regret not having a senior engineer's eyes on the core architecture when we hit 10,000 orders a day. But right now, the ability to iterate at the speed of a thought rather than the speed of a weekly sprint is a massive advantage.
Most established brands are trying to figure out how to bolt AI onto old, rigid workflows. We’re building the workflow around the tool from day one. That is a gap the competition won't be able to close easily.