Everything at christiangehrke.com was built with AI. None of it was built by AI. That difference is the whole story, and it's why the site still feels like mine.
I've built websites since 1997. In May 2026 a side project brought me back: ProPre, a tool in the browser that takes a coloring book from its first prompt to a print-ready cover. Eight single-page prototypes came out of one day with Gemini. Within two days there was a first working version, and by June it was talking to Claude. Since then everything on this site has been built the same way: the lake, the Parts Catalog, the Workshop, the Studio, the Field Notes and the made-up magazines on the newsstand.
The partners have names. Mostly it's Claude. Gemini helps with prompts, images and videos. Google Flow and OpenArt make images and video, and Google AI Studio does the audio.
Who decides
Here's how the work splits. The AI writes most of the code, drafts the words and writes prompts for pictures. I decide what the site is. The ideas are mine: A.L.T.A. came to me on October 9, the brass automaton that ties the tools together is my parable, and Starlee got her name after someone told me I could do better than Robot Marley. The taste is mine too. The rides, the drone flights and the coloring books are real, and so is every call about what stays and what goes.
GlazyArray, the narrator, is a good example. Claude wrote the prompts for her and I rendered the clips. Helena didn't like the first voice, so it changed. Her eyes took a few tries: no whites, then alarming whites, then calm. None of that came from a machine having taste. It came from us looking at it and saying no, not yet.
Step by step: how a Note gets made
- I gather it
Photos, clips, a track and a voice note go into a Drive folder, or straight into the Studio.
- The Studio brings it in
Videos stay on my server to be trimmed into loops, and bracketed photos are merged. I mark every picture real or made with AI.
- Claude drafts, and asks
A first draft from my notes only, with a list of questions for anything it doesn't know rather than a guess.
- I answer and edit
My answers go back into the Note in my words; the draft is rewritten from them.
- I publish
Only I can publish. It goes live in about a minute, with its share card and a magazine to wear.
The house rules
What makes it a partnership and not an "AI built" site is a short list of rules every AI that works here has to follow. They're written down in the code itself, and they started as things I said out loud:
Facts on the site come only from my Notes or my own words. When a draft doesn't know something, it asks me rather than guessing. Did this ride start or end at home? Who's in the hammock? How were these pages made? People stay anonymous unless they've agreed to be named, and home is never on the map. No brands or text inside AI pictures.
Every picture says whether it's real or made with AI, and real gets labeled just as clearly as AI. I fly a drone under an FAA Part 107 certificate and have since 2018. Those photographs are real, and I want people to know which ones they are.
We need to try and be clear about what is real as much or more than what is AI.
And nothing on the page snaps. Every light fades, every scroll eases. That one is a lesson from the Tumble, and it's the kind of thing a person notices that a model never would.
- Facts on the site come only from Christian's Notes or his own words.
- People stay anonymous unless they've agreed to be named.
Never publish the home location.
- No brands, logos or text inside AI renders.
- Lights ease on and off, always. Nothing snaps.
- Never commit secrets.The coloring books
The coloring books are where the partnership is most obvious and most handmade at the same time. The pages are made with AI, but the prompts behind them took months to refine, tailored to each subject, and I built my own tool to help write them. A coffee book you color while drinking coffee. Salads that pair the ingredients with the finished dish, so the book works as a cookbook. Small worlds inside jars. The catalog has 101 titles in it, and 8 are published so far.
Why it still feels handmade
Because it's slow in the right places. Things get tried, looked at and thrown out. A magazine called COL & COBBLE became ROLLING TERRAIN because I only own a mountain bike and I like to cruise. The tagline is my own motto: I'm not here to break records, I just don't want to break anything. That's how I build the site too.
The partner is there on a Sunday afternoon when a Note full of video clips won't save, and it finds the bug, fixes the server and builds a way to get the clips back. But the Note is still mine. So is the site.