Build Sprint · No. 03 · Season One
This is recap No. 03 of Build Sprint, an eighteen-Thursday live-build series at Granite City Coworking. Each week we ship a working thing you can take home. The prep page is for the forty-eight hours before; this is what remains after.
What we built
Thursday you leave with a URL you can text to your mother. Not a preview link that expires. A site on infrastructure that stays up and costs nothing, plus — the part that actually matters — a way to keep it current that survives the week after a workshop.
The move is not "use AI to make a website." The move is: your agent holds the connection to your code and your host. "Change the hours to 7am" becomes a real edit and a real deploy, without you touching either. Everything lands in GitHub, so if tonight's enthusiasm breaks something next Tuesday, the working version is one sentence away.
You can rebuild this. Pick a track, connect the accounts, and say one of the three pitches below. Track 1 is enough for most small sites. Don't overbuild. Netlify MCP setup
Why it's built this way
A website builder is a product you rent. An agent that edits a repo is a habit you keep. That is the design decision. Builders are fast on night one and expensive on night thirty, because every change is a session in someone else's UI. A repo plus a host plus an agent is slower by twenty minutes of setup, and then "add next month's schedule" is a sentence.
We ran two tracks up the same river so the room didn't have to pretend everyone needed Git. Track 1 is Netlify only: you describe the site in their dashboard, they build and deploy, you never install a thing. No version history of your own — if a change goes wrong you ask the agent to undo it. Track 2 is Netlify plus GitHub plus your agent. The site lives in a repo, every push deploys itself, and you can always get back. Most small business sites are genuinely fine on Track 1. Track 2 is what you grow into the moment the site stops being a brochure.
The quoted lines on the board were the whole curriculum. Not a framework. Not a template marketplace. A sentence you would actually say, pointed at a site you would actually keep.
Ninety seconds later, it's live. That sentence is the product demonstration. Hours, a menu, a class schedule, a price list, this season's lineup — anything that changes often enough that a normal website becomes a chore and you end up putting it only on Instagram, where nobody can find it. The site is not the asset. The cheap edit is the asset. That is why an agent that holds the keys beats a builder you log into once a quarter.
Where it broke
No recording or transcript of this session was captured. The section below is reconstructed from the prep page and the designed failure modes we built around — not live notes from the room.
The designed failure is overbuilding. People hear "agent" and "GitHub" and climb onto Track 2 because it sounds more real, then spend the hour on connectors instead of on the page. The prep page said it plainly: don't overbuild. The reconstruction of the room is that some people did anyway, and the ones who shipped a one-pager on Track 1 were the ones with a URL at 5:00.
The second bite is the Netlify connector on Track 2. Same class of problem as session 02's Meta OAuth: a permission screen, a workspace mismatch, a green dot that isn't a working pipe. The backup was on the page for a reason — drag-and-drop from any browser, no MCP required. If the connector gives you trouble, don't fight it during the hour.
Track 1's trade-off shows up the following week, not Thursday. There is no commit to roll back to. You ask the agent to undo, and you are trusting the agent's memory of what "undo" means. That is fine for a phone number. It is not fine for a site you have been feeding for a month. The reconstruction: the interesting break is not the deploy. It is discovering, six days later, which track you actually needed.
Track 2 costs twenty more minutes of setup in exchange for a full history. Netlify's agent only works with GitHub — not GitLab or Bitbucket — which is a constraint worth knowing before you pick a host for religious reasons. Hosting and the repo are still free. The minimal spend is your agent. If tonight's enthusiasm breaks something next Tuesday, the working version is one sentence away. That sentence is the reason to climb the extra track, and not a minute before you need it.
Three sites worth an hour, if you come with a project. The page that answers for you — who you are, three things you do, a contact link. The thing you keep retyping — next month's schedule, a skipped session. The idea you want to test — three headlines, three URLs, ten people this weekend. Come with something real. The hour is not a demo of Netlify. It is a URL you keep.
The prompts
Come with something real and you leave with something real. These are the three pitches from the session — each one fits in the hour, each one is a site you'd keep. The quoted lines are what you actually say to your agent.
One page about what you do and how to reach you. The point isn't the page — it's that updating it costs one sentence instead of one Saturday.
Build me a one-page site for my consulting practice — who I am, three things I do, a contact link. Then push it to GitHub and deploy it to Netlify.
Hours, a menu, a class schedule, a price list. Anything that changes often enough that a normal website becomes a chore.
Add next month's schedule to the site and mark the Nov 26 session as skipped.
A landing page for the business you haven't started. Ship it tonight, put it in front of ten people this weekend.
Make me three versions of this landing page with different headlines, deploy all three, and give me the links.
Take it home
The take-home is the live URL and the habit. The connectors are documented; the backup is drag-and-drop.
- Netlify MCP server — The Track 2 pipe from your agent to your host.
- GitHub signup — Where Track 2 files live, and why you can always get back.
Next Thursday: An AI SDR that keeps the loop
Session 04: not a lead list. A loop that keeps running after you leave — three ICPs, one experiment in the water, a review that runs on Monday whether you remember it or not. Save a seat on the season calendar.