Learnings from a 1.5-day agentic website rebuild

Last week, Patching rebuilt its entire website from scratch in just 1.5 days for £208, taking full ownership of both code and hosting. With agentic coding, anyone can now build product—the constraint is no longer technical skill, but token budget, efficient use of AI agents, and focused time. As product creation becomes cheaper, distribution and differentiation matter more than ever.

Starting with a Secure Foundation

Patching has always operated within a tightly secured Microsoft 365 tenant, using managed devices, conditional access and Defender XDR, with a more recent addition of GitHub enterprise. This foundation made it straightforward to adopt an agentic development approach with Claude and Replit.

Why Move Off HubSpot?

HubSpot remains central to our CRM and lead‑to‑cash process, but its underlying content structure became restrictive. After a late‑night dive into AI research, we decided to rebuild using Replit and deploy on Azure. Within 1.5 days, the new site was live.

Key Learnings

Use AI as both strategist and executor. Claude guided architectural decisions; Replit handled rapid build cycles. When switching agents, create a brief to prevent context loss.
Combat context rot. Long chats degrade quality—regularly request a summary to reset the context window.
Align git strategies early. Replit’s separate git history created merge conflicts. Cloning GitHub’s master repo into Replit solved this and ensures rapid, 10‑minute deployments.
Don't use your company domain as your CRM tracking domain. Moving HubSpot from patching.co to crm.patching.co broke historic links—an intentional trade‑off to gain strategic independence. A polished and helpful 404 page mitigates the impact.
No need to migrate HubSpot blogs. Replit can build your site so that it fetches published posts from the Content API at build time.
Use the Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud you already have. A free tier Azure Static Web App is delivering excellent performance and keeps hosting, GitHub and agent API usage under one subscription.
Version‑control DNS and legal pages. DNS changes are now managed through GitHub pull requests with approvals. All legal content is stored in version‑controlled markdown to ensure clarity and auditability.

Cost Breakdown

£153 — Replit Core (annual plan for two users)
£2.22 — Additional Replit tokens
£52.99 — Claude tokens from long, inefficient chats

Total: £208.21

Bottom line

The cost of shipping new tools has collapsed—but the potential for distraction and tech debt has exploded. Rapid prototyping within arbitrarily defined constraints is the safest way to validate ideas before investing serious time.