I mass-generated 300 AI websites. Most were garbage. Then something clicked.

Hey IH 👋

Two months ago I mass-generated around 300 websites using my own AI builder. I'll be honest: the first 100 were so bad I wanted to mass-delete them and pretend this never happened.

But somewhere around website #100, something weird happened. People started saying "wait, AI made this?"

Here's the full story.

CHAPTER 1: The Confidence Phase
I launched PromptGear thinking I'd cracked it. Type a prompt, get a website. Great, right?

First user prompt: "luxury flower shop"

What I expected: elegant, modern, beautiful.

What came out: a website that looked like a funeral home designed by someone who just discovered the color purple. Every shade of purple. Purple gradients on purple backgrounds with purple text.

The AI had technically delivered. It was indeed luxurious. And it was indeed purple.

CHAPTER 2: The "Why Do I Even Bother" Phase
So I started testing obsessively. Every day, dozens of prompts. Here's a fun sample of what my AI produced:

"modern tech startup" → a page with so much whitespace it looked like a 404 error
"cozy coffee shop" → stock photo heaven, zero personality, Comic Sans somehow appeared despite not being in any prompt
"professional law firm" → actually decent, but it put "WE SUE EVERYONE" as the hero heading. Technically accurate for a law firm I guess.
At this point I had two options: quit, or figure out why every AI website builder produces the same generic garbage.

I chose to figure it out.

CHAPTER 3: The Dirty Secret of AI Web Builders
I tested every major competitor on the market. Most of them.

And here's what most of them do: they pick a template, swap colors and text with AI, and call it "AI-generated." It's basically a template engine with a chatbot on top.

That's not building a website. That's filling in a Mad Libs.

The real challenge isn't generating HTML. Any LLM can spit out a <div>. The challenge is making something that:

Actually looks like a human designer made it
Works on every screen size without breaking
Matches what the user had in their head (not what the AI hallucinated)
Doesn't look like every other AI website
And THAT took me 100 failed generations to understand.

CHAPTER 4: What Actually Fixed It
I'm not going to share exactly how (you're welcome, competitors 😘), but the breakthrough was realizing that AI doesn't need more freedom, it needs more constraints.

Think about it. When you tell a junior designer "make something cool," you get chaos. When you tell them "make a landing page with a dark background, one accent color, max 3 sections, no gradients, typography-focused," suddenly they produce gold.

Same with AI. The more specific the rules, the better the output.

After implementing this, generation #147 was a flower shop that actually looked like a real flower shop. Not a funeral home. Not a purple explosion. A clean, elegant, "I would actually buy flowers here" website.

That was the moment I knew this could work.

CHAPTER 5: The Numbers Nobody Talks About
Here's what indie hackers building AI products won't tell you:

Your AI costs are the tip of the iceberg. The API call is maybe 30% of your actual cost per user. The rest? Hosting, storage, deployment infrastructure, monitoring. I learned this the hard way after my first month's bill.

Free users are your best QA team. They will try to generate a clone of Apple, a PayPal phishing page, and a "full SaaS with Stripe integration" from a single prompt. Each of these broke something. Each made the product better.

Nobody. Cares. About. Your. Tech. I spent weeks building an elegant backend architecture. You know what the first user feedback was? "Can the fonts be bigger?" I could have been running this on a potato server and they wouldn't know the difference, as long as the output looked good.

CHAPTER 6: Where I Am Now
Today, PromptGear generates websites that actually look good. Not "good for AI," just good. A complete website, from prompt to a live page with its own URL, in 2-3 minutes.

And I'm not stopping. Every day I test the capabilities of different AI agents, compare their outputs, fine-tune prompts and push the boundaries of what they can do. One agent handles layout better, another is stronger at copywriting, another has a better sense of color. The art is in finding the right combination and making them work together so the result doesn't look like a compromise, but like intent.

It's not a "finished product." It's a constant experiment, and that's exactly what I love about it.

The Actual Lesson
Every AI product goes through the same cycle:

"AI is magic!" → you ship it
"AI is garbage" → users show you reality
"AI needs guardrails" → you figure out constraints
"AI + good constraints = actual product" → you finally have something
Most builders are stuck at step 1, selling "AI magic." The ones that win will be the ones that mastered step 4.

Try it yourself: promptgear.dev - you can generate a homepage for free, no signup needed.