Season One · 18 Thursdays
Build Sprint · Session 03
Tonight you ship a real site to the real internet, and then you change it without opening a code editor once. You describe the change, your agent makes it, and ninety seconds later it's live. Below is the fifteen minutes of setup that decides whether you spend the session building or watching someone else build.
The run
A live site at a real address, and — the part that actually matters — a way to keep it current that survives the week after a workshop.
Not a preview link that expires. A URL you can text to your mother, on infrastructure that stays up and costs nothing.
Your agent holds the connection to your code and your host. "Change the hours to 7am" becomes a real edit and a real deploy, without you touching either.
Everything lands in GitHub. If tonight's enthusiasm breaks something next Tuesday, the working version is one sentence away.
Pick a lane
Same destination — a live site you change by asking. The difference is how much machinery sits behind it. Read both, pick one before you arrive, and don't overbuild: most small business sites are genuinely fine on Track 1.
The whole thing, inside one browser tab
Netlify has an AI agent built into its own dashboard. You describe what you want, it builds and deploys, and you never install a thing or connect a second account. No GitHub, no terminal, no API keys — you sign up and start talking.
The setup you grow into
Your site lives in a GitHub repo, your agent works against that repo, and every push deploys itself. More moving parts, and worth it the moment the site stops being a brochure — publishing regularly, working SEO, running more than one page, or letting someone else touch it without you holding your breath.
Before you arrive
In order — each one hands something to the next. Track 1 only needs the first two. Tick them off as you go and this page will remember where you stopped.
Any of these will get you through tonight. Pick the one you'll actually keep using — the whole point is that this thing is still around on Monday. If you already have a favorite that can browse and run tools, bring it; the steps translate. On Track 1 you can skip the install entirely and use the agent built into Netlify — it offers Claude Code, Gemini, Codex and OpenCode from a dropdown.
What I'll be driving on stage. Connects to GitHub and Netlify through MCP, and Claude Code rides along for the heavier lifting.
DownloadStrong free tier, no install, runs fine in a browser tab. The most frictionless option if you're deciding at 3:55.
Open GeminiI have a small number of beta invites to hand out. Grab one if you want to see what an always-on agent feels like — it's early, and it's worth poking at.
Claim an inviteWhere your site will actually live. The free plan is genuinely free — no credit card at signup, and no surprise bill later: if you ever blow past the monthly allowance the site pauses until the next month rather than charging you. A site like tonight's won't come close.
Sign up with the same email you use for GitHub if you can. It makes step three a single click instead of a detour.
GitHub is where the site's files live, and it's the reason you can always get back to a version that worked. Create the account first if you don't have one, then connect it to whichever agent you picked in step one — in Claude Desktop that's Settings → Connectors; in most others it's a "connect an app" or "tools" screen.
You'll get a normal permission screen. Grant it and you're done — no keys to copy, nothing to paste into a file.
Same move as step three, pointed at your host. Once this is live your agent can deploy on its own, read back the build log when something fails, and tell you the URL — which is the difference between an agent that writes code and one that ships it.
If the connector gives you trouble tonight, don't fight it. There's a drag-and-drop path that works from any browser and we'll use it as the backup.
Bring a project
Come with something real and you'll leave with something real. Pick whichever of these is closest to a thing you've been meaning to do — each one fits in the hour, and each one is a site you'd keep. The quoted lines are what you actually say to your agent.
One page about what you do and how to reach you. The point isn't the page — it's that the next time your rates change or you finish a project worth showing, updating it costs one sentence instead of one Saturday.
Hours, a menu, a class schedule, a price list, this season's lineup. Anything that changes often enough that a normal website becomes a chore and you end up putting it only on Instagram, where nobody can find it.
A landing page for the business you haven't started. Headline, the promise, an email box. Ship it tonight, put it in front of ten people this weekend, and find out whether anyone wants it before you spend a quarter building it.
Tonight
Roughly. Live builds drift, and the drift is usually the interesting part.
Two things worth knowing
If a connector won't cooperate, there's a drag-and-drop path that puts the same site on the same internet with no accounts wired together at all. Everyone leaves with a live URL. And if you get stuck mid-session, say so out loud — half the room will be stuck on the same step, which is the whole reason to do this together instead of alone.
This is the same stack real sites run on: version control, a global CDN, an automatic deploy on every change. The site we build in an hour is small. The way it's built is not a workshop shortcut — it's how the work is actually done now.