Lately, some prospective clients have been asking us about AI website builders — why hire a developer when AI can build a site easily and inexpensively? Fair question. So we sat down with Durable.com and tried building a real site with it. Here’s what we found.
What people picture when they say “build my site with AI”
If you’re thinking about having AI build your site, you may be expecting to use regular language for the whole process: describe what you want, and keep adding content, and making changes until the site is ready to go live — all without ever touching a traditional page-builder interface.
So today we sat down with a website builder that markets itself as fully AI-driven. Durable.com describes itself as your “always-on AI business partner,” with ongoing natural-language conversation shown as the entire way you interact with your site. We tried building a real site with it, entirely through conversation. Here’s how it went.
The initial draft was good
We’ll give credit where it’s due: Durable created a nice-looking website, quickly and easily. Durable asked us to upload all of our content, and gave us some themes to choose from, then created a clean, professional-looking site hosted on the Durable server.
But there’s a catch, and it’s a big one: it only works well if you have all your content ready before starting. Every team member’s bio and photo. Every testimonial. Every service description. Every FAQ answer. All of it, complete and ready to paste in, before you start. And this is all before you get a chance to see what it would look like on the site.
Most people building a site don’t do the process in one single step. They want to see a prototype and make changes until they’re satisfied. And that’s exactly where things started to fall apart with Durable.
We asked it to move one section down the page
First, something that seemed simple: move one section — “The records don’t speak for themselves.” — a few positions lower on the homepage. Not a redesign. Not new content. Just move it down.
Here’s how it went:
“Reordering sections directly isn’t supported through the editing tools I have available.”
— the AI, several messages into the conversation
The AI’s workaround was to delete the section and rebuild it from scratch. That’s when things really went sideways: the rebuilt section came back with placeholder text, not our original content. What followed was a long, halting sequence of the AI trying to fix its own mistake: guessing at what it could edit, succeeding on one, failing on another, contradicting itself about what was even possible.
“I’ve been going back and forth too long. Let me step back and give you a clear status.”
— the AI, after roughly a dozen failed attempts to restore the original text
It ended here:
“The fastest fix is actually the website editor itself — you can click into that section and retype the heading, kicker, and the four blurbs in a few seconds.”
— the AI’s final suggestion
In other words: after all that, its own advice was to abandon the AI chat and go do it by hand. The exact thing a “just describe what you want” tool is supposed to save you from.
See the full transcript
Since things weren’t going well with this task, we decided to put it on hold and proceed with entering testimonials.
We asked it to add our real testimonials
We hadn’t entered testimonials in the first pass, so Durable built a testimonials section with three placeholder quotes. We figured adding real testimonials would be simple: give the real content to the AI and have it swap them in.
“Where do you want it? On your homepage, or as a new ‘Testimonials’ page?”
— the AI, appearing not to recognize the testimonials section it had already built
See the actual chat transcript
We never actually got to finish. The chat ended abruptly, having used our entire monthly AI message allowance.
Two requests. Neither one finished.
Here’s the part that should really give you pause: after giving up on the reorder, we still wanted to add our real testimonials. We answered its questions and told it exactly where to place them — and before it ever made the change, it told us our monthly AI message allowance was gone, and the only way to keep going was to upgrade. Between the failed reorder and the unfinished testimonials, we’d used up the entire month’s quota, and neither conversation produced the result we’d asked for.
And when you run out? There’s exactly one way to keep going: pay for the next tier up. Free plan, Tier 1, Tier 2 — doesn’t matter where you start. Every level has a cap. Hit it, and the message is the same: upgrade to keep talking to the AI that just burned through your quota failing to do what you asked.
What this actually means if you’re thinking about using AI to build your site
Put together, here’s the pattern we saw, consistently, across every real change we tried to make:
- You describe what you want, in plain English.
- It doesn’t fully understand — it asks a clarifying question. You answer. It asks another.
- Each back-and-forth eats into a small, capped monthly allowance.
- Eventually it attempts the change.
- Either it tells you it can’t actually do it — or it does something, but not correctly.
- Either way, you’re the one who has to notice something’s wrong, and you’re the one who has to fix it — usually by hand, in the very editor you were trying to avoid.
- Want to try again? Pay for a bigger plan.
One more thing worth saying plainly
A company saying “Build your site with AI” doesn’t mean it offers a modern, capable AI. Some AIs are very capable and others aren’t. The buyer has no way to tell in advance what they’re getting.
Back to what people picture
We started this page with what people picture when they say “build my site with AI” — an easy ongoing conversation, no page-builder interface required. What we found doesn’t match that picture. The one part that worked smoothly, picking a theme and dropping in your content, isn’t really an AI achievement at all. It’s the same thing you’d get from Squarespace or Wix. The AI conversation is where the actual promise was supposed to live, and that’s exactly where it broke down.
Thinking about your own website? Tell us about your project and we’ll tell you plainly what it’ll take to get it right.