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"It felt like trying to control a drunk child. Sometimes it was brilliant. Mostly, it was unpredictable."
Duncan Cook, CEO, 3 Sided Cube
TL;DR
We didn’t get a finished site, but we did end up with bold ideas, a new way of working, and a few prototypes that are... let’s say “educational.”
👉 Want to have a play? Links below. Just don’t tell our UX team:
🔍 The Day 2 AI playground
https://v0-fork-of-dynamic-ai-website.vercel.app
🚧 The in-progress site at the end of the week
https://3sc-website-ai-experiment.vercel.app/services
How It Started (and quickly spiraled)
Being the team of curious Cubies that we are, we set ourselves a little challenge: build an AI-first website in a week.
No half measures. No safety nets. Full commitment to using AI at every stage – from the first wild idea to the last broken button.
Spoiler: We didn’t finish the site.
But we walked away with something way more valuable: a genuine shift in how we think about building, collaborating, and what it really means to be an AI-first agency.
What Even Is an AI-First Agency?
It’s a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. But we didn’t just want to say it. We wanted to live it – to see if AI could actually help us:
Ideate faster
Build smarter
Create better
Move with (even more) purpose
So, we assembled a cross-discipline crew of Cubies. Locked them in an AI-fuelled think tank. And got cracking.
🎥 Here’s how it started
Spoiler: lots of excitement. Slight scepticism. Possibly not enough snacks.
The Tools: All of Them. At Once.
We didn’t play favourites. We used everything. Claude, GPT-4, Gamma, Cursor, V0, Firefly, Midjourney. If it could generate, build, animate, or hallucinate, we gave it a go.
Early on, it felt like magic. Jake whipped up a design playground in V0 that built itself based on prompts. Buttons morphed. Ghosts floated by. One page even caught fire. Because… AI.
But like any good playground, the swings eventually gave way to scraped knees.
The Curve: When AI Starts to Break Up With You
By Tuesday, things got weird.
Chats got confused. Styles stopped sticking. Outputs got flaky. Mornings were powerful – by the afternoon, it was like AI had clocked off.
“It was like we were trying to hold onto a good idea while it slid off the table in slow motion.”
Matt Lawrence, Head of Marketing
The tools weren’t broken. They were just... over it. So we adapted. We gave the chaos a name. A process. And some much-needed structure.
We called it Smooshing™.
“Smooshing was how we brought all the weird, wonderful, semi-working AI components into something cohesive. And usable. Ish.”
Kev Borrill, Web Team Lead and accidental coiner of the term
The Human Layer: Still Very Much Required
Here’s the thing: AI can be brilliant. But it doesn’t replace your team – it just changes what they need to focus on.
Suddenly, our devs weren’t just coding, they were quality-controlling, course-correcting, and reshaping codebases written by machines with opinions.
Designers weren’t just laying things out, they were art directing against an unpredictable (and sometimes very stubborn) collaborator.
And writers? AI’s idea of “tone of voice” was often “generic American corporate LinkedIn”. Not quite Cube.
The AI Cliff: A Visual Nosedive in Five Days
There’s a moment every project hits the wall. Ours was Tuesday.
You could feel it in the Slack messages. In the glazed eyes. In the creative metaphors that got more unhinged by the hour.
But if you want cold, hard proof of when things started to slide...EXHIBIT A:
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What you’re looking at is a beautifully chaotic drop-off in AI usage across the core website challenge team.
The week started strong, full of curiosity, optimism, and a surprising amount of animated buttons. But as the days wore on, people started reverting to old habits. Figma reappeared. Manual fixes crept in. Googling things came back.
Except for Kev. Kev was (mostly) unshaken. A steadfast picture of AI resilience. Until even he succumbed, ever so slightly.
This graph became our unofficial mood tracker.
The closer to Friday we got, the more we smooshed. The less we prompted.
The Learnings: Some Good, Some Chaotic, All Useful
Here's what stuck with us:
🧠 The dopamine trap is real
AI gives you ideas at lightning speed. But it’s easy to fall down a rabbit hole, tweaking things endlessly to chase the next “a-ha!” moment. Structure helps.
🎢 AI gets worse throughout the day
Yes, really. We found the quality of outputs dropped after lunch – likely due to global usage load. Mornings were peak productivity.
🧩 Use every tool you have
No one tool was good at everything. We learned to hop between AI, Figma, dev tools and back again – stitching ideas together manually when needed.
🛠 AI is brilliant at the hard stuff, terrible at the basics
Need a multiplayer websocket experience with custom cursors? AI’s got you. Need to align a button? Absolutely not. No chance. Good luck.
What We Actually Built
We didn’t finish the site.
But we did build:
A living style guide
Playful interactions that respond to users in real time
A working prototype with multiple pages
AI-generated visuals, icons, and content (some of which we even kept)
A new internal process (hello again, Smooshing™)
🎥 Here’s where we landed
Delirious but proud. And possibly covered in post-it notes.
Step Into The Chaos: Try It For Yourself
Okay. Deep breath. We’re going to do something that makes our UX team categorically unpsyched.
We’re sharing the raw, unfiltered prototypes.
These aren’t final, they aren’t signed off, and they definitely don’t have our usual Cube polish and stamp of approval. But they do represent what we were building live, in real time, powered by AI, maximum caffeine, and pure experimentation.
Explore the Day 2 AI playground (a.k.a. where the weird stuff lives):
👉 https://v0-fork-of-dynamic-ai-website.vercel.app/
Check out the rough cut of the site we built across the week:
👉 https://3sc-website-ai-experiment.vercel.app/services
We’re sharing these because the journey and learnings matter just as much as the shiny new platform at the end, and we pinky promised to bring you along for the ride, warts and all.
The exciting bit? Now that we’ve lived it, broken it, smooshed it, and survived it, we’re taking everything we learned and applying it to build a real site we’re proud of. The kind with structure. And UX. And maybe even QA.
Watch this space – the new, AI-first 3SC site launches next month (fingers crossed).
And That's A Wrap
This wasn’t just a fun little experiment. It gave us a genuine blueprint for what our future could look like as an AI-first agency.
No, it’s not perfect. Yes, it was chaotic.
But it pushed us to rethink old habits, break old workflows, and prove to ourselves that we can move faster and bolder with AI as part of the team, not just another tool.
“If this is the start of our AI journey, imagine where we’ll be in six months.” Kev Borrill, Web Team Lead
Head over to our AI labs to follow all our shenanigans!
Published on 16 April 2025, last updated on 16 April 2025
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