April 2026
Here is the short version, so you don't have to read the whole thing to get the point: I use AI every day, on purpose, but I never let it decide what you say or how your site feels. I treat it like a power tool. A power tool makes a good carpenter faster. It does not make a bad carpenter good, and it will happily cut your hand off if you stop paying attention. So I keep both hands on it. You get the speed without the slop.
I want to walk you through what that actually looks like, because "we use AI" has become a meaningless thing for an agency to say. Everybody says it. The question that matters for your business is how and where a person is standing between the machine and your customers.
The slop problem, in plain terms
You've seen it already, even if you didn't have a name for it. Open ten websites in your industry and nine of them sound like the same robot wrote them on the same afternoon. Same friendly-but-empty paragraphs. Same stock photos. Same "we are passionate about delivering solutions" nonsense. That's slop: AI output that nobody shaped, pasted into a template, and shipped.
Here's the thing that should worry you about it. For years, looking generic just meant looking boring. Now it's worse. The search engines and the AI assistants people use to find a plumber or a lawyer or a contractor are getting very good at spotting that there's nothing real underneath. When your site sounds like everyone else's, you don't just blend in to a human eye, you become genuinely hard for these systems to tell apart from the noise. Sameness used to be a missed opportunity. In the AI era it's closer to being invisible.
Anyone can paste AI output into a template and call it a website. That's the easiest thing in the world to do now, which is exactly why it's worth nothing. I'd rather do the harder thing.
AI as leverage, not as the author
So where do I actually point the tool? At the parts where it gives me leverage without ever touching your voice or your judgment. Three real examples from the work I do every day.
It guards your contact form. Spam is a tax on every small business with a form on its website. The junk comes in, you wade through it to find the one real customer underneath. I have a Claude classifier (that's Anthropic's AI) reading every submission before it ever reaches you, sorting the real human who needs a quote from the bot that wants to sell you something. The AI does the tedious reading. The decision about what a real lead looks like was mine to set, and the message that gets through to you is from an actual person. That's the pattern for everything: machine does the grunt work, I keep the judgment.
It keeps your whole site current, for free. This one is more behind-the-scenes, but it's the part I'm proudest of. I run hundreds of client sites, and the technology underneath them gets updated by the people who make it a few times a year. Normally, keeping up means a developer hand-touching every single site, which is why most agencies just... don't, and your site quietly rots. I built a tool I call "night-fox-trainers" that uses AI to help me upgrade my entire fleet in sync whenever a major release lands — and in the vast majority of cases, at no extra charge to you. The AI handles the repetitive heavy lifting across hundreds of sites. I review and sign off. You wake up on a current, secure site and almost never get an invoice for it. I do it because it's right, not because there's money in it.
It helps me draft, then you and I make it true. When I write the words for your site, I'll often use AI to get a rough draft moving, the same way a writer might talk a first pass out loud before fixing it. But a draft is not the product. The product is what's left after I cut the generic parts, and after you and I put in the things only you know, the way you actually talk to customers, the job you're weirdly proud of, the thing your competitors get wrong. That's the part no model has, because it isn't on the internet, it's in your head. My copywriting and content curation work is really about pulling that out of you and onto the page. The AI never gets the last word. You and I do.
Why a heavy hand is the whole point
I think about the line between leverage and surrender constantly, because it's easy to cross without noticing. The moment AI decides what your customers read, see, and feel, you've handed your business's voice to a machine that has never met you and doesn't care whether you eat. I'm not willing to do that to you, and frankly I wouldn't do it to myself.
This is also why I won't pretend AI is magic that replaces the work. It's a fast, tireless apprentice. A good apprentice is a gift. But you don't let the apprentice sign off on the job, and you don't let it talk to the customer unsupervised. Used that way, AI is also a real opportunity, your site can be built to be understood and quoted correctly by the AI assistants people now use to find businesses, which is its own kind of craft. That's what my AI optimization work is about: making sure when someone asks an AI for a recommendation, your real business shows up looking like itself, not like the slop next door.
The relationship that gets you the best result is more like working with an architect than hiring a vendor. I bring the engineering, the craft, and yes, the sharp tools. You bring the one thing none of it works without, which is the truth about your business. AI just lets me spend more of my time on the parts that need a human, and less on the parts that don't.
If that's the kind of work you want done on your site, with a real person holding the tool, take a look at what I do or just tell me about your business and we'll talk.