ISSUE #2 THE LAB NOTES

I Let AI Build My AI Website. Twice. Here's What Happened.

The story of a Lithuanian identity crisis, a door that led nowhere, and the strange experience of using AI to fix what AI broke.

There's a particular kind of irony that comes with running a website about artificial intelligence. “I finally got it right” I said to myself with a bit of smug satisfaction. “It needs some content tweaking, but almost ready for publishing.”

I asked my trusty Claude AI to review the site for errors. Everything was a green light until “Are you aware your site is introducing itself to the world as Mąstymo Banga?” I was not aware of that. I didn’t even know how to pronounce it.

This is the honest story of how I built AIRevolution — twice — with AI doing most of the heavy lifting, and everything that went sideways along the way. It's also the story of how AI helped me find and fix the very problems it created. No hype. No fear. Just the unfiltered reality of what it actually looks like to build something with these tools right now.

Act 1: The Site That Couldn't Leave Home

Before the site you're reading now existed, there was another AIRevolution.

I built it using an AI tool called Horizons. The process was surprisingly smooth — I described what I wanted, the tool generated a complete, functional website, and within a few sessions I had something that looked genuinely good. Clean layout. Solid structure. A real website.

Then I tried to move it.

Horizons had no export function. No migration path. No way to take what I'd built and host it anywhere outside their platform. The site was complete, but it was stranded — a finished product locked inside the tool that made it. I had to walk away and start over.

But I couldn’t bring myself to just throw out the information contained in the site. There was good content there. So I kept it around lingering in its own space and copied the information I needed. Some of that information made it into the new site.I felt a little sadness and frustration at losing that original code though. It had some really cool graphic features built in.

The lesson I took from that experience wasn't that AI tools are bad. It was that before you commit to any AI-assisted platform, you need to ask one question first: can I get my work out if I need to? Lock-in isn't always obvious at the start. It tends to become obvious at the worst possible moment.

Act 2: Starting Over

The second build happened in Hostinger using their AI website builder. I gave it the concept — an AI education site called AIRevolution,and an outline detailing the way I wanted it to be structured. It wasn’t as nice as the first one, but with cleanup and some housekeeping it looked better. A full site structure, navigation across a dozen pages, content on each one, consistent styling throughout. In terms of raw speed, no human team was going to produce that volume of output that quickly. But speed and completeness are not the same thing.

As I started actually reading what the AI had built, things got interesting.

The Mistakes AI Left Behind

Mistake #1: It Gave the Site an Identity Crisis

The first thing I noticed — well, the first thing Claude AI noticed when I asked it to review the live site — was that my brand new AI website was introducing itself to the world under a completely different name. Not AIRevolution. Not anything close to AIRevolution.

Mąstymo Banga.

That's Lithuanian. It translates, roughly, to "wave of thought." Which is actually a lovely concept — but not what I was going for when I named my site after the technological shift reshaping the entire planet.

Mąstymo Banga was buried everywhere. The browser tab. The page title tag. The Open Graph metadata that tells Facebook and Google what to display when someone shares a link. The navigation logo. The footer. An image alt text on one of the inner pages poetically described a photograph as symbolizing "the mąstymo banga, or wave of thinking."

Had the AI lived a previous life as a Lithuanian nobleman? Perhaps it hungered for “Hot Pink” summer soup. Or maybe it just determined that “Wave of Thought” was a much better idea. Actually I like it too. Maybe a new blog series title would be appropriate.

If I had launched a Facebook campaign that day, every single share would have displayed a Lithuanian brand name that nobody could pronounce, including me.

I'd asked the AI builder to create an AIRevolution site. It had created one — and then quietly assigned it a different identity in all the places that mattered most, using language it had apparently pulled from somewhere in its training data. Why? I still don't fully know. That's one of the genuinely strange things about working with these tools. They make confident decisions they never explain.

Tracking down every instance of Mąstymo Banga proved to be difficult. It was hiding in three separate locations, two of which required different fixes. The global site name field in Hostinger's settings handled most of it. The image alt text on the AI page had to be edited manually. And then there was the cache — Hostinger held onto the old version for long enough that even after the fix was made, checking the live site kept returning the Lithuanian version. Patience required.

Mistake #2: It Left Its Fingerprints Everywhere

Buried on my homepage, invisible to the naked eye, sitting between the call-to-action button and the main tagline, was a single line of text:

Write your text here…

The AI builder had created a text block as a placeholder and simply never filled it in. The text was white on a white background — visually invisible when browsing the site normally. But it was there in the page code, fully intact, ready to surface in a screen reader, a search engine crawler, or anyone who happened to view the page source. This one taught me something worth remembering about AI-generated output: it delivers the appearance of completeness before the reality of it. The site looked finished. It wasn't finished. The AI had no way to tell the difference, and more importantly, it had no way to tell me.

A human building a site knows when they've left something blank. The AI just... moved on.

Mistake #3: It Built a Door That Led Nowhere

The navigation bar included a Blog link. Professional. Logical. Expected.

Clicking it took visitors to a completely empty page.

Not a 404. Not an error message. Just a blank page with a contact footer and nothing in between — a door that opened onto a wall.

My actual blog posts existed on the site. They were accessible if you knew the direct URLs. But the blog index page — the page the navigation pointed to — had no connection to them whatsoever. The AI had built the architecture without wiring the rooms together.

Anyone who landed on the site, got curious, and clicked Blog in the first days it was live hit that dead end and had no obvious next step. How many of them left and never came back? No way to know.

How AI Helped Me Fix What AI Broke

So there I was with Mąstymo Banga all around me. But I couldn’t see it. Every time I asked Claude to scan my site the bothersome tag was showing up everywhere in the metadata. That’s when it hit me. Claude could see everything!

So I began asking detailed questions. Where is this tag located? Where exactly is the hidden text on a white background located? I didn't notice the Mąstymo Banga metadata situation myself. Claude caught it on the first review of the live site, flagged exactly where it was appearing, and walked me through why it mattered — specifically that the og:site_name metadata was what Facebook would display when anyone shared a link. Without that context, I might have fixed the logo and missed the metadata entirely.

The placeholder text was invisible when browsing normally. Claude found it in the page code and pinpointed its location between specific elements on the page, which told me exactly where to look in the editor.

The blog index diagnosis required back-and-forth — Claude scanned the page, noticed the blank output, and walked through the likely causes until we landed on the right one. It couldn't fix the Hostinger settings directly. But it could tell me precisely what to look for and where. And in the process of discovery the AI taught me. Next time I will know what to check first. I will be aware of what happens when the metadata isn’t correct.

This is the part that doesn't make it into most conversations about AI tools: the same technology that creates problems is often the most efficient tool for finding them. AI doesn't have ego. It doesn't get defensive about mistakes. Ask it to review what it built and it'll tell you what's wrong with the same tone it used to build it. I could ask to drill down until the problem revealed itself. After each update I would give the webpage some time to propagate the new information then have Claude rescan. Eventually all the issues were resolved and the page received a clean bill of health. Every single one of these problems was identified, diagnosed, and resolved with AI assistance.

Before You Launch Anything AI Built — Check These

If you're using an AI tool to build a website, a document, or anything else that's going out into the world, run through this list before you hit publish:

• Check your site name in the metadata, not just on the visible page. View the page source and search for your brand name. If something else shows up, find the global settings field, not just the logo. Search the source code for placeholder text. Common phrases to look for: "write your text here," "lorem ipsum," "your title here," "add your description."

• Click every navigation link as a first-time visitor would. Don't assume the architecture is connected just because it looks connected.

• Read every page title and meta description individually. AI builders often reuse template descriptions across multiple pages.

• Check the copyright year. It will probably be wrong.

• Ask if you can export your work before you commit to any AI platform. Find out on day one, not after you've built something you can't move.

The Independent Verdict

AI got me a functional, structured, visually coherent website in a fraction of the time it would have taken to build manually. That part is real and worth acknowledging.

But it also handed me a Lithuanian brand name, an invisible placeholder, and a navigation system that pointed nowhere — and it did all of this with complete confidence, no warnings, no flags, no "you may want to check this."

The lesson isn't “don't use AI to build things.” The lesson is don't walk away when AI says it's done.

The current reality of working with these tools is that they perform best when there's a human in the loop at every stage — not to do the work, but to check it. AI as builder. Human as editor. That combination works. Either one alone has gaps the other fills.

AIRevolution exists because of AI. It's also readable, functional, and properly named because a human stayed in the room.

Issue #3 is coming. It is not yet set in stone. Maybe I’ll let AI choose the topic.

— AIRevolutionary

No Hype. No Fear. Just Clarity.

Contact

Questions or feedback? Reach out anytime.

Email

airevolution@dirverse.com

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