Real build stories
Real work with AI, documented honestly
Builders, freelancers, and businesses share what they shipped with AI, automation, and AEO/SEO — what worked, what broke, and how they fixed it. Read their build logs, skip their mistakes, and share your own.
Build
Someone ships something with AI, automation or SEO.
Break
It goes wrong, and they say exactly how.
Share
They publish the build log, failures included.
Fix
You read it, skip the mistake, or add what worked for you.
What really happened, including the parts that went wrong
Half Dev publishes first-hand accounts of building with AI, automation, and SEO. Most stories like this online are polished until the failures disappear. Here, a build log that admits an agent quoted the wrong price for two weeks is the point, because it saves the next person from making the same mistake.
Both formats are free to submit. Free stories carry a byline only, with no backlinks and no company promotion.
Want to know whether AI search can see your own site? Try the free checker
Build Log
A full case study: the problem, the stack, what broke, and the result.
Read Build LogsQuick Win
A single tip or fix you can read in a couple of minutes.
Read Quick Wins
Free tool
Is your site actually visible to AI search?
Enter your domain in the box and scan everything at once: three real, rule-based scores — AEO (12 checks: schema, AI-crawler access, headings, freshness and more), SEO (11 checks: indexing, sitemap, canonical, title, alt text and more), and GEO (8 signals: llms.txt, AI bot access, entity markup, FAQ schema and more). No API cost, no signup.
See the full checklist →Want to check one thing in detail? Pick a dedicated checker below. Jump to the checkers ↓
Enter a URL above — free, rule-based, no API cost.
Free checkers
Want to look at just one area? Each checker scores one part of being found by search and AI, and shows what to fix.
Featured investigation
What the data shows
AI-readiness scan of 97 large sites
A scan of 97 large sites shows publishers block AI crawlers while SEO and developer sites publish llms.txt. The piece lays out the numbers, their limits, and exactly how the scan was run.
Read the investigationHalf Dev Report: what you get from a free page scan
A walk through the report from our own home page: three scores, what passed, what's missing, and the fixes.
Build LogWP site not indexed? 1 checkbox cost us 7 months
How one WordPress checkbox kept my brother's site out of Google for seven months, and how I found and fixed it.
Why Half Dev exists
I got tired of success stories that were really just advertising.
After 13 years fixing power steering systems, not writing code, I started building with AI and automation. Half Dev is where builders publish the real version: what worked, what broke, what it actually took.
More on whyLatest build logs
WordPress to Next.js: Why We Migrated Anyway
The WordPress site's problems could all have been fixed in place. Here's the real PageSpeed data and the honest reasoning for migrating to Next.js anyway.
Lorem Ipsum Live on a Brother's Site: Full Audit
A paid, "completed" WordPress build was still showing lorem ipsum on its Privacy Policy, Contact Us, and footer. Here's the full audit and the custom admin panel that came out of it.
How we built the Half Dev report
The decisions behind our printable scan report: why it stays in your browser, how its text is written and tested, how it prints, what it leaves out, and what we would do differently.
Latest explainers
How to Use a Free Site Scan for Client Audits
Learn how freelancers and agencies can use a free page scan to triage client sites, explain findings calmly, and avoid overselling what a score means.
Which basic checks fail most often (follow-up)
A follow-up scan of 97 large sites ranks all 12 basic checks by how often they fail. FAQ schema and freshness fail most, and no home page passed everything.
What your Half Dev score means
Learn how the SEO, AEO and GEO scores are built, how partial credit works, and what a score does and does not tell you about your page.
Free library
Templates and prompts you can download and use.
WhatsApp Lead Qualifier Agent
Classifies inbound WhatsApp messages (booking, pricing, complaint, spam) and logs qualified leads to a sheet. Swap in your own WhatsApp + LLM credentials.
DownloadContent Freshness Checker
Weekly job that walks your published posts and emails you when one hasn't been touched in 180+ days — pairs with the freshness check in the AI-Visibility Checker.
Download
Behind Half Dev
Real work. Real problems. Practical solutions.
Half Dev is where I document the work behind the projects: building with AI and automation, troubleshooting technical problems, testing ideas, and finding out what actually works.
I share the process, not just the polished result. That means the mistakes, the fixes, and the decisions that made a difference.
How it works
How a story gets published
Submit
Write up what you built. It's free, byline only, with no backlinks or company mentions in the body.
Review
A moderator checks it against the free-tier rule and the editorial guidelines before anything goes live.
Publish
It goes live under your name. If something needs fixing later, it's corrected visibly, not edited silently.
The Half Dev approach
Build something. Learn something. Share it.
Every project teaches you something. Sometimes an idea works. Sometimes it breaks. Often, the most useful lessons come from figuring out why.
We believe those lessons are worth sharing.
Half Dev encourages builders, developers, freelancers, and business owners to document their real experiences: the challenges they face, the approaches they test, the mistakes they make, and the solutions they discover.
You don't need to have everything figured out. You just need to share something useful and be honest about what you learned.
Have something worth sharing?
Turn your experience into something another builder can learn from.
Explore publishing opportunities