On website building...

All anyone is talking about is DeepSeek. It is all over my timeline, close to 47 thought pieces have hit my inbox in the past 48 hours, and now China has all my data. If you haven’t already tried it — you should. It’s wild and really does behave differently than ChatGPT or Gemini. My two favorite pieces I’ve read on it are:

• What I've been reading on Deepseek, written by Umang Jaipuria, my former Twitter colleague.

• Some quick thoughts on DeepSeek, written by Kevin Novak, who built Uber’s first surge pricing model and is the Manager Partner at Rackhouse.

However, this post isn’t about DeepSeek.

Instead, it’s about the experience I had building websites with new AI tools last week.

First — I’ll step back into some big-picture framing:

The promise of the internet and technology is to make things that are difficult.… easier.

We’ve seen this idea tested and reshaped time and time again.

Classic examples: Facebook connecting people, Uber coordinating transportation, Airbnb reimagining travel, and Square simplifying business payments.

AI has had a similar unlock — but for language and code.

It has taken something challenging (writing, processing & retrieving information, and coding) and has made it a thousand times easier.

Now, I’ll connect some ideas together. Front-end development has always been uniquely painful — not just because the code is finicky, but because it demands both technical expertise and design taste.

I first wrote about the future of front-end engineering and design in The Future of UI/UX with TLDraw last April after feeling so inspired by TLDraw’s demo.

Since then, we’ve seen a wave of AI-native UI/UX and website tools that have hit the market — all extremely powerful. a16z wrote about this in their market map, How Generative AI Is Remaking UI/UX Design.

As investors, we’ve been following this space closely, and as a builder, using these tools feels like magic.

Last week, I built two websites:

AI Engine: UK University Hackathon

It took me 20 minutes to build this using Bolt. It is a static, straightforward website for an AI hackathon I’m organizing with Bessemer, Dawn Capital, and Seedcamp. Dawn’s marketing team had created a promotional poster for us. I uploaded the poster and the announcement details to Bolt and prompted, “Please create a website that has all the announcement information, and the colors match the marketing poster.” And in a one-shot prompt… it created the masterpiece below.

Btw if you’re in London, would love for you to join as an industry mentor or participant. Click here.

Practice Playlist

This one took me 45 minutes to build using a platform called Tempo Labs. It is fully functional with a Google login flow, connected to Supabase for user data storage, and the front end is completely flexible. Initially, I had created a skeleton of this as a personal website to track the songs I’m learning on guitar using Replit. Entering the new year — my guitar teacher said a bunch of his students had forgotten what songs they were learning, so asked me if I could generalize it for everyone. I redesigned everything in Tempo, and the result was a website with 100x better design and way more advanced features. Now, 15 students are actively using it, lol :)

This past year has been full of “holy shit, this is possible?” moments. Building two polished websites in under an hour with Bolt and Tempo felt empowering. It’s clear we’re entering an era of AI tools that drive further creation — and barriers between ideas and execution are coming down.

It's not a novel idea, but it’s one I can’t help but comment on: the real magic is in the fact that large language models are becoming so powerful — that they enable anyone to create anything and anyone to step into an engineering role.

They are simultaneously simplifying creation while making functionality more sophisticated and advanced.

And…. I imagine all of this will become further accelerated now that DeepSeek is also in play 👀

Thank you for reading!

I’m an investor at Chapter One, an early-stage venture fund that invests $500K - $2M checks into pre-seed and seed-stage startups.

If you’re a founder building a company, please feel free to reach out on Twitter (@seidtweets) or Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesin-seidel-5325b147/).