March 2026: The Month Our Build Changed
For eight years our quality control was one very caffeinated person squinting at a website. In March we gave that person a much better set of tools. Here's what changed, what didn't, and the rules we hold ourselves to.
The before times
Since 2018 we've built websites the same way. Design in Webflow, build it carefully, check it by hand, hand it off, and teach the team to run it. Clients were happy. We were happy. Our eyeballs were tired.
Because here's the unglamorous truth about web work: the creative part is maybe a third of the job. The rest is checking. Does every image have a description for screen readers? Does every page have exactly one main heading? Does anything wiggle sideways on a phone? Does that link from 2021 still go anywhere? A careful person can check a few pages. Nobody checks all of them, every time.
What happened in March
In March 2026 we brought Claude Code, an AI coding tool, into the studio and plugged it into the platforms we already live in: Webflow, our hosting, our analytics and our code. Within a few weeks, a project looked different.
Under the hood Webflow publishes an official MCP server. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets an AI tool work with other software through a defined set of actions: read a page's structure, create a class, update a CMS item. It can't do anything the account it runs under isn't allowed to do, and in our setup every change lands on a staging copy of the site before a person decides it goes live.
What got faster
The checking. Scripts now run through every page of a site before anything ships, and they don't get bored on page 47. A sixty-page site gets the same scrutiny as a six-page one. Integrations that used to eat a week of trial and error, like syncing a client's Eventbrite events into their website, now take a fraction of that time, and they come with tests.
Under the hood Our pre-publish checks look for one H1 per page, alt text on images, broken links, valid structured data, accessibility issues (using axe, the engine behind the accessibility score in Google Lighthouse) and sideways overflow at eight screen widths, from 2560 pixels down to phone size. They run against staging, and a person reads the results before anything is promoted to the live domain.
What didn't change
AI doesn't decide what your website says or how it looks. People do. Every design decision has a name attached to it. Every word we publish for you is written with you, not generated at you. And nothing goes live until a human has looked at it and said yes.
Think of it like a really good power drill. It makes a carpenter faster. It does not make the drill a carpenter.
The house rules
- AI is the power tool. People are the craftsmen. A person is accountable for everything that ships.
- No slop. We don't publish words or code nobody has read. Automated checks catch what a tired eye misses, and a person still makes the call.
- Secure by default. Your accounts stay in your name. Access is limited to what the work needs. Changes go to staging before they touch your live site.
- Speed is the dividend, not the pitch. Going faster only matters if it buys you something.
So what does it buy you?
That last rule is the one we care about most. When the build gets faster, more of your budget goes to the work that actually moves your business: strategy, design, and the custom software that used to be out of reach for a company your size. It's the reason our full partnership can now include an app layer with no build fee. Yes, really. We wrote a whole post about the math.
And if you ever want to know how something on your site was built, ask. We love showing our work.