I Built This News Section With AI
We wanted a news section on the website. Rather than reach for a Content Management System (CMS), I built a static site generator setup using an AI coding assistant in a single session. Here's how it went.
The problem
The Ozzy Software website is a single HTML file. Simple, fast, no moving parts. I wanted to add a news section without changing that fundamentally. No database, no Content Management System (CMS) to maintain, no third-party platform we don't control.
I went with 11ty as the generator. Posts are written in Markdown, 11ty builds them into static HTML, and the output drops straight into the website.
Where the AI came in
The whole thing was built in a single session using Claude Code, Anthropic's CLI tool that works directly in your codebase. Rather than writing boilerplate templates, configuring 11ty from scratch, and manually wiring up RSS feeds and sitemaps, I described what I wanted and the site was built iteratively.
It's a reasonable illustration of how LLMs have shifted things. A few years ago this would have meant installing WordPress or something similar, and with that comes a lot you don't ask for. Setup time, a plugin ecosystem, an admin interface, hosting considerations. The CMS would have been the project. Here, it wasn't.
Static site generation isn't new, and a brochure website has always been more of a design problem than a development one. This site isn't going to win any design awards. But it's clean, it's consistent, and there's very little that can go wrong with it. For Ozzy right now, that's the right trade-off.
What I ended up with
- Posts written in Markdown
- A drafts folder (posts only appear in production when moved to the published folder)
- Auto-generated RSS feed at /feed.xml
- A sitemap that covers the whole site, rebuilt as we post content
- Search and tag filtering on the news index
- Author pages
Is this approach for everyone?
No. If you need a non-technical team writing and publishing content independently, a CMS is the right call. But if you're comfortable directing an AI coding assistant, the setup that once made a pre-built CMS the easier choice is no longer the obstacle it was.
Using AI coding assistants
If you haven't tried an AI coding assistant for this kind of task — scaffolding, boilerplate, wiring things together — it's worth doing. For a session like this one it saved a significant amount of time. There are several tools in this space now.
It's not a replacement for knowing what you're building. But as a tool for getting from idea to working implementation faster, it's become a regular part of how I work at Ozzy Software.