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My Brief Built My Website

Sep 2026 · DaRoy Perkins

I shipped daroyperkins.com today. Design, copy, GitHub repo, hosting, custom domain — live in an afternoon. I didn't write a line of code.

Here's the part nobody talks about: the website wasn't the hard part. Knowing what to say was. And I already had that written down.

The brief did the heavy lifting

Before I ever said "build me a website," I had a brief: who I am, what I'm building, how I talk, what I'm known for. Fourteen years in commercial solar. The superintendent who ships software. TradeStack, Mari0, the journeyman license I'm chasing. The positioning was already decided — sitting in a markdown file.

So when I told Muse "build my personal site," there was no blank page. No twenty questions about who I am or what I do. It already knew the headline, the projects, the voice. It just had to execute.

That's the part people miss. The brief isn't just for chat — it's build material.

What Muse actually did

  • Designed the site around what it knew about me: near-black, electric amber, the ⚡ that's basically my signature at this point
  • Wrote the copy in my voice — not generic "welcome to my portfolio" filler
  • Built it as a pure static site: HTML and CSS, no framework, no build step, nothing to maintain
  • Created the GitHub repo and pushed every change
  • Turned on GitHub Pages and wired up the custom domain
  • Walked me through the DNS records, then verified the whole thing was live

I approved things. It did things. That's the division of labor.

What I still had to do

Honest accounting:

  • I made the calls — design direction, what goes on the homepage, what each post says
  • I touched DNS myself — the A records and CNAME went in by my hand
  • I approved every publish before it went live

The human checkpoints are the point. You stay the superintendent. The AI runs the crew.

The playbook

  1. Write your brief — who you are, what you're building, how you sound. (There's a fill-in-the-blank template in my last post.)
  2. Tell your assistant the outcome, not the steps: "build my personal site and get it live."
  3. Let it pick the boring stack: static site, GitHub Pages, a domain you already own.
  4. You handle the checkpoints: design approval, DNS, the final ship-it.

Total cost: a domain I already owned and an afternoon of decisions.

"Your brief is the most undervalued file on your computer. Stop briefing. Start building."