People Say AI Can Build a Website in Five Minutes. So I Tried It.

I have a website I dearly love. It is based on—I started to say sixty years of study and work, but it is probably more accurate to say sixty years of living, studying, working, questioning, changing my mind, and occasionally discovering that something I taught twenty years ago has come back with an entirely different meaning.

The website has taken me months. Quite a few months. And it still is not finished.

Meanwhile, I keep seeing people talk about building a website with AI in five minutes. Sometimes they seem to be making $10,000 a month by the following Tuesday. I may be exaggerating slightly, but not by much.

So I tried it.

I gave AI a title: The Field of Becoming. I gave it a general idea of what the site was about and said that people should be able to discover workshops or private work. I also said I wanted it to be an experimental, stand-alone space.

This was not an AI coming to me cold. We have worked together for a long time. It knows a great deal about Feel the Flow, The Way of Flow, my work with energy, my background in adult learning, and the way I think about transformation. It knows the words I tend to use and quite a few of the words I do not want to use. It had plenty of good material.

Then it built the website.

Not quite five minutes, perhaps, but close enough to make the point. There it was—a complete website with beautiful colors, graceful movement, organized sections, workshop descriptions, private sessions, information about me, and invitations for people to make contact.

It was factual. It was attractive. It was coherent. It had a different organizational sequence from my existing website, and some of that organization was useful.

There was nothing wrong with it. Not a thing wrong with it.

Except its energy.

I noticed that the farther I traveled down the page, the farther the language drifted away from the language AI and I create together. It began to sound like AI speaking about spiritual and transformational work. The phrases were lovely. They were also familiar in the way that polished language can be familiar even when I have never read those particular sentences before.

The website knew what kind of website it was supposed to be. It recognized the pattern: contemplative professional website. Then it completed that pattern very capably.

What it did not contain was the process through which my work has found its language.

When AI and I work together piece by piece, I may begin with something I have been thinking about or something that happened that morning. AI responds. I read it and say, “No, that is not quite what I mean.” Sometimes the problem is one word. Sometimes the sentence is accurate but the energy is wrong. Sometimes the response helps me recognize that I do not yet know what I mean.

We stay with it.

A different phrase appears. I hear something in it that opens another connection. That connection changes the original idea. A story enters. Something from adult learning meets something from energy work. A model I have used for years shifts slightly because I can now see another movement within it.

The finished paragraph carries all of that, even though the reader may never know how many turns it took to get there.

That is what was missing from the five-minute website. AI had the background, but it did not have the relationship that happens while a particular piece is becoming. I had handed over the title and the project. AI did what AI does extraordinarily well: it gathered the available patterns and produced a finished form.

But the form had arrived before we had discovered what The Field of Becoming wanted to become.

This is beginning to feel like an adult-learning question as much as an AI question. A learner can produce the correct answer without having gone through the experience that changes understanding. The product may look the same from the outside. The developmental process is different.

And the process leaves an energy in the product.

That may sound abstract until something is technically right and still does not feel alive. Then the difference becomes surprisingly clear.

I am not suggesting that people should stop building websites with AI in five minutes. Sometimes five minutes is exactly what is needed. If the purpose is clear, the structure is familiar, and the website simply needs to present information and make it easy for someone to act, AI can do a remarkable job. The website it built for me demonstrated that.

Nor am I questioning the people who say they are making substantial money from quickly built AI websites. I would be quite happy to join them. I simply do not want to make that kind of website for this particular work.

Feel the Flow is not a product I thought up and then needed to package. It has grown from decades of teaching, learning, practicing, writing, living, losing, beginning again, and noticing what actually helps transformation occur. The website is part of that exploration. Every time I revise it, I understand the work a little differently.

Of course it has taken months. I am not merely arranging pages. I am discovering what wants to live there.

That realization changes the question I am asking about AI. The question is no longer, “Can AI build me a website?” Clearly it can.

The more interesting question is, “What part of this creation can be handed over, and what part can only emerge through relationship?”

The specialized website builder can create the structure, make the page work, and turn our decisions into something people can visit. But perhaps it comes later. First, AI and I need to remain in conversation long enough for the meaning, language, sequence, and felt movement to become visible.

Then the website builder is not being asked to decide what the work means. It is being asked to give form to something already alive.

I will probably continue taking months to build my website. I may even finish it someday, although I am making no promises. And I will continue working with AI—not because it can replace the slow relational process, but because it can participate in it.

That may not produce a five-minute website or $10,000 by next Tuesday.

But it may produce something that feels like mine.