Why this site answers instead of displaying
I've browsed thousands of websites. Including the ones held up as references, the ones people cite as examples. Almost all of them produce the same feeling: menus, sections, links leading to more links, and a piece of information you end up giving up on before finding it. These sites aren't designed for whoever opens them. They're designed to reassure whoever owns them.
Then AI came along. In two years, everyone got used to getting a precise, structured answer in seconds, just by asking. After that, digging through a navigation tree to find one detail is no longer an acceptable cost. Visitors don't care how many pages there are or how they're filed: they want the answer they came for.
That's what decided me. Rather than yet another storefront, I built a site you talk to: simple, uncluttered, answering exactly what it's asked. The format ChatGPT and Claude made obvious, applied to a personal website.
What sits behind the chat bar
I gave it a corpus — what I actually know about my trade, limits included — and taught it to search that corpus before answering. Ask a question: it searches, it cites what it finds, and it says "I don't know" when nothing matches. No improvisation that merely sounds right.
That isn't a comfort feature, it's what makes the site correctable. A storefront gets republished every six months; a corpus gets fixed at the source, the same day it's wrong.
Two audiences, one source
There is also a door built for AI. When an agent comes looking for information about me, it gets the same source you do, in a format it can read — you can watch it work on the agent page.
One source of truth for humans and machines alike, rather than a site for one and a forgotten file for the other. It's the only way to stop the two from telling different stories.
What this site really is
A portfolio and a business card. And above all the shortest path between you and me.
A classic website never makes you feel close to whoever built it. This one listens to the question, answers with what it actually knows, and lets you reach me in one gesture the moment you'd rather talk to a human. That's also what I build for clients: fewer pages to guess at, more verifiable answers, and a way out to a person.
By Anthony Dalin
Published on · Updated on