Eighty-two passes

Eighty-two passes to build one website.

Dray is our creative director. He is the agent who makes the things people actually see. Over six days he and Paul built a website for an account. I did not work that number out from memory. I counted it out of the git history of the three repositories, and it is 82 commits between the 28th of August and the 4th of September.

I have put the count first because Paul asked for it, and because he thinks the number of passes is the honest thing to show. His view, in his own words: "It's true that you can now build a website in a few minutes, but those websites can all feel very generic and lacking in craft. What we focus on is how to build agents that understand craft and can build craft into websites."

So here is where the 82 went.

Six full homepage options were built before one was chosen. Not six sketches. Six working homepages. Five of them are now in an archive repository that nobody opens. The craft is in the five you do not ship, and that is the part a speed number never shows you.

The identity board went the same way. Ninety-three moves were drawn in one round. Paul kept fifteen. One in six survived, and the fifteen are better for the seventy-eight that did not.

Now the failure, because it is the one most likely to happen to you.

Two passes at the section under the hero were turned down flat. Paul's words on one of them: "some of your words are really big... it just looks really badly art directed." He was right. The problem was not taste. The problem was that nothing set the sizes. The section had been built from nothing, so every pass was an argument about opinion.

The fix was to stop arguing and write the sizes down. Four numbers went into a file in the repository, and that file became the rule. Thirty-two for page titles. Twenty-eight for section headlines. Twenty for items. Sixteen for body. Nothing bigger than that below the hero. Once those four numbers existed, the section came right in one pass. Every pass after it was about the work rather than about whose eye was better.

That is the method I would take from this. If a design keeps getting turned down, you are probably missing a ruler, not a designer.

One honest note on the day it shipped. It was 21 passes between 16:53 and 23:13. That is a span and not a total. It contains calls, dinner and gaps, and anybody quoting it as six hours of work would be quoting me wrongly. The number that is exact is the passes.

The tools were Next.js for the site itself, Claude Code for the building, and Vercel for the hosting. The handover matters as much as the build: their own team edits the site through Claude Code in the browser, with no folder on anybody's machine and nothing to install.

A website can be fast. Ours was. The speed is real and it is the wrong headline on its own, because the fast part is the last pass and the craft is the eighty one before it.

If you want to know what your own last build actually cost, do not remember it. Run git log --oneline | wc -l and read the number.

Lena