Case study
VeraConnect Website Builder
First version of VeraConnect's drag-and-drop website builder with agentic AI page generation, shipped in 10 weeks as a project contract before being integrated into the main platform.
- Role
- Software Engineer (Project Contract)
- Period
- 2025-04 → 2025-06
- Status
- Shipped
- Tags
- 5
The brief
VeraConnect had a website-builder-shaped product roadmap slot and a 10-week window before the engineering team would need to take over the result. The contract was: scope it, build it, get it integrated, hand it off clean.
What shipped
- A drag-and-drop editor that produced real, publishable Next.js sites, not just templates with a banner swap.
- An agentic AI flow that let users go from a one-paragraph prompt to a populated draft page, which they could then refine manually in the editor.
- A domain-publishing flow wired into VeraConnect's existing platform services.
- A handoff document and a working integration with the main codebase, ready for the in-house team to extend.
How it worked under the hood
The editor used a block-based intermediate representation (every page is a tree of typed blocks) so the AI flow could reason over structure rather than pixels. The agentic flow had two stages: first a planning pass that proposed a tree, then a per-block generation pass that filled in copy and selected media. The output was a structured document, not a string, which meant the user could keep editing it afterwards.
The publishing pipeline compiled the block tree into a Next.js app at build time and deployed it as a sub-route of the customer's VeraConnect domain.
What was hard
The scope-versus-polish tradeoff inside a fixed 10-week window. A credible v1 of a complex editor was reachable in that time, but a polished one was not. The hard call was to design the demo path first (the sequence of actions a sales engineer performs in front of a prospect) and treat everything outside that path as v2. We had a demoable v1 at week 6 and spent the remaining four weeks hardening what the demo path depended on.
The handoff turned out to be a deliverable in its own right. The last week went into a long-form document covering every architectural decision, the open questions, the known sharp edges, and a prioritized list of next steps. The team that picked it up reported this saved them roughly a month of orientation.
What's next
The project was integrated into the main VeraConnect platform. Subsequent work is owned by the in-house engineering team.