AI can now build a whole website. Here's the honest take...

The tools that generate images and video with AI are now moving into building whole websites and apps. The latest is a big one, and it's worth a straight look rather than the hype.

In short: AI can build you a website faster than ever, but fast and finished are not the same thing.

What's changed

Higgsfield, a well-funded AI company best known for video and image generation, has launched Higgsfield Apps: a tool that generates and deploys full websites, apps and browser extensions using AI, with its media models built in, through its own platform and Claude.

It's part of a wave of tools promising to take you from an idea to a live website without a developer.

What it means for local businesses

These tools are genuinely impressive, and getting better. The catch is the gap between the slick demo you see online and what you can actually get out the other end.

“It's impressive, but it often falls flat, and the barrier to get what you see online is so big,” says Dominic, owner of Hobart web design and digital marketing agency Wakeford Digital. “It's definitely useful if you know what you're doing. The difficulty is burning time and effort into something that may not work.”

Left unattended, without a clear brief, the output tends to turn generic and repetitive, and you can go a long way down a rabbit hole in time and cost before you know whether you've got something worth using.

Our take

AI is a brilliant tool for filling gaps and speeding up the process, and we use it every day. The difference is where the human comes in.

“We use AI to help fill the gaps and speed up processes, that's where we see the benefit,” says Dom. “But human intervention, not out of any preference, just as a cross-reference to enhance the foundation, is where the real value is.”

That's the bit these tools still can't do for you: the strategy, the brief and the judgement that decide whether a website actually works or just looks the part. It's the same thinking behind how we design and build websites, and we're digging into it properly in an upcoming blog post.