I built a website for my wife's business recently. Claude did most of it and it came out great. Done, I thought.

Then I asked it to review the website.

It came back with a list. Things to fix for Google search rankings. How to set up the business profile on Google properly. Accessibility problems I hadn't thought about. Bits that didn't work well on a phone.

Be honest with yourself for a second. Would you ever do any of that? I wouldn't. Not unless I'd built it in up front, which I didn't, or paid someone, which I wasn't going to. That work is hours. It's boring. It's the kind of thing that sits on a list for a year and quietly never happens.

So I asked Claude to fix it. And it did.

That's the part I keep coming back to. I didn't have to know what good accessibility looks like. I didn't have to learn how business profiles rank. I asked a question, got an answer, said yes please, then reviewed it and checked it worked. A few minutes of my attention on something that would have cost me a weekend or a few hundred dollars.

We left features out of our MVP. The usual reasons. Not enough time, not important enough yet. One of them sat there for months.

I wrote a prompt one afternoon. Claude built it, I had it test it, I reviewed the result. What would have taken me hours of real work took about five minutes of me.

We were also going to pay for an AI chatbot for it. Then it turned out to be so easy to build one ourselves that we just did. It took no time at all.

A lot of people say AI creates a tonne of slop. They're not wrong, but I don't think that's the whole story.

Slop is what you get when you ask AI to do too much with too little input and too little guidance. Big ask, no direction, no iteration. Of course it comes back rubbish.

Ask great questions and iterate in a way that actually makes sense, and you get a lot done. I'm no expert, but that's been my experience every time.

It's not that I can build more things. It's that I can make the things I build so much better than I ever would have on my own.

All the polish I used to skip. The second and third pass on something that was already fine. The review I'd never have paid for. That's cheap now, and it's where most of the quality lives.

So what's sitting on your list that you've never got around to? Your website, your business profile, that feature you keep putting off. Ask AI to review it and see what comes back. I reckon you'll be surprised at what you've been leaving on the table.

-Ben