I Built a Website in Two Days with Claude
The Sticky Note Experiment
Four months ago I was sitting at my desk at 11 PM staring at a blank sticky note.
I had just come out of a week where I synthesized 25 global Teams meetings using M365 Copilot. Distilled hundreds of hours of conversation into leadership-ready insights for my team. It should have taken me weeks. It took hours.
And I remember sitting there thinking: I just did something that would have been impossible twelve months ago, and nobody around me is talking about it. Not at Microsoft, leadership circles, coaching calls, church. Not anywhere.
I picked up a pen and wrote three words.
Become AI Fluent.
I stuck it on my monitor and left it there. It’s still there. Today is Day 134.
What happened in those 134 days is why I’m writing this essay. Because somewhere between that sticky note and right now, I stopped being someone who uses AI and became someone who builds with AI. And the distance between those two things is the entire conversation nobody is having.
Here’s the part most people skip.
When I say I’ve been in tech for nearly 30 years, people hear success. They hear Microsoft Director. They hear x-Amazon, EMC, Cisco, 20 years leading technical teams, the trajectory.
What they don’t hear is the part where I was homeless, sleeping in a truck with a pet rat named Merlin, living in my addiction, and waking up every day wondering if this was the day it would all end, and not particularly caring if it did.
In 1994 I walked into a church and something broke open. Not the polished kind of breakthrough you see on Instagram and socials. The ugly kind. The kind where you’re standing in the back row with nothing to your name and you raise both hands because you have literally nothing left to lose.
I rebuilt everything from there. Customer support to escalation engineer to product manager to director at one of the largest technology companies on the planet. Thirty years of building, one brick at a time.
I’m telling you this because it’s the only way you’ll understand what happened next.
The moment the trajectory changed.
Sometime around Day 40, I realized I wasn’t just learning AI. I was thinking differently. I was looking at every meeting, every document, every workflow and asking a question I’d never asked before in three decades of work:
What if I designed a system where AI does the heavy lifting and I do the thinking?
Not “how do I prompt this better.” Not “what tool should I use.” Something fundamentally different.
I started calling it AI fluency. And I defined it like this:
AI fluency is the ability to take messy, high-context business challenges and design repeatable workflows that produce leadership-ready outputs faster.
Read that again. It’s not about prompts or tools. It’s about systems. It’s about looking at the actual work you do and rebuilding the operating system underneath it.
The leaders who understand this will run the next decade. The ones who don’t will spend the next three years learning prompt tricks while the ground shifts underneath them.
So I built something to prove it.
Last week I sat down and built a production website from scratch.
BecomeAIFluent.com
A Leader Unlock production.
A cinematic, single-scroll experience with real photography, scroll-triggered animations, a live day counter tracking those 134 days, and a full subscribe integration wired to my Substack.
I designed it, coded it, deployed it to Vercel, connected a custom domain, configured DNS, wired the subscription flow, and polished the visuals across multiple rounds of iteration.
I am not a developer. I have never written a React component. I have never deployed a Next.js application. I have never configured Vercel or GitHub Actions or DNS records for a production site.
I did all of it in a single conversation with Claude over a couple of days in the evening.
Let me say that differently so it lands.
A non-technical executive with zero frontend development experience shipped a production-grade website to a custom domain in one sitting. The site is live. You can visit it right now. It works. It’s not a demo. It’s not a prototype. It’s a real site connected to a real publication with over 1,100 real subscribers.
That’s not a flex. That is the entire argument for AI fluency, compressed into a single proof point.
What’s coming next.
The website is the foundation. Here’s what’s being built on top of it.
The Podcast: “Building AI Fluent”
A video podcast launching on the Leader Unlock Substack and simulcasts to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Every episode documents a real challenge I’m working through as I build AI fluency inside one of the largest enterprises on earth.
This isn’t a tutorial show. It’s not “10 prompts that will change your life.” It’s a working executive sitting in front of a camera and showing you what it actually looks like to transform how you work with AI, in real time, with real stakes.
Episode 1 is called “I Have a Confession.” Because the most important thing I can do before teaching you anything is tell you the truth about where I started.
The Daily AI Briefing: An Autonomous Agent
This is the part that matters most for where the industry is going.
I’m building an AI agent that runs every night at midnight with zero human authoring. It reads the day’s AI news, filters it through MY leadership lens, writes strategic takes in my editorial voice, curates relevant job postings where AI fluency is the differentiator, and surfaces practical training resources.
Every morning you’ll wake up to a fresh briefing that sounds like me, thinks like me, and focuses on what matters to the leaders I serve. Not because I stayed up all night writing. Because I built a system that does it.
The agent reads from what I’m calling an Editorial DNA file. A living document that captures my perspectives, hot takes, current focus areas, and editorial voice. It’s essentially an ongoing conversation between me and the AI that steers everything it produces.
There’s a human-in-the-loop approval step at launch. I wake up, review the draft, click Approve, and it publishes. Over time, as the system learns what I approve and what I reject, it earns more autonomy.
That is AI fluency. Not a clever prompt. A system, workflow, and architecture that produces leadership-ready outputs while I sleep.
Why I’m building all of this in public.
Because I’m tired of the gap.
The gap between what AI can actually do inside real work and what most leaders think it can do. The gap between the executives who are quietly transforming their workflows and the ones who are still asking their teams to “explore AI.” The gap between knowing something is important and actually doing the work to get fluent.
I’ve lived in that gap. I was in that gap 134 days ago.
Building in public means you see the messy parts, false starts, and the broken deploys where the DNS takes 30 minutes to propagate and you’re refreshing Vercel like a kid waiting for Christmas morning. I’m not going to polish this into a highlight reel.
This is what real transformation looks like and honestly if you are a leader where I was 134 days ago… it’s uncomfortable. But it changes everything.
If you lead people, build things, or make decisions that matter, this is for you.
BecomeAIFluent.com is the front door for fluency. Leader Unlock is the engine behind it. Here's what you get as a subscriber:
Every week on Leader Unlock, one leadership essay that cuts deep that I personally write, not AI. The kind that makes you put your phone down and think deeply in a good way. Personal stories, hard-earned frameworks, and the kind of honesty most people save for their therapist.
Plus the podcast, the daily AI briefing, and first access to everything I build here and on Become AI Fluent.
Free to start. Premium subscribers ($7/month or $77/year) get full archives, bonus content, and early access to everything. Founders Circle members get direct access to me, including private mentorship and priority coaching.
The sticky note is still on my monitor.
Day 134.
And we’re just getting started.