I Built itchydog.vet in Five Days. Here's Every Ugly Version.

If you’ve ever wondered what building a website with AI actually looks like, not the polished thing at the end but the ugly middle, this is it. itchydog.vet went from a blank starter page to the site I now hand to clients with itchy dogs in five days. It saved 142 versions along the way. Claude pulled the old ones back up, ran them again, and cut them into a one-minute video.

What is itchydog.vet?

It’s for owners of itchy dogs. I’ve given the allergy talk in the exam room more times than I can count, and I wrote a whole book that’s basically the long version of it. The site is the version you can pull up on your phone at 11 at night when your dog won’t stop licking his feet.

Type your ZIP and it tells you whether today’s pollen, mold and weather are likely to make your dog itchy. Around that there’s a plan for tonight, plain-English answers on why dogs itch, honest takes on the itch meds and what they cost, and an itch diary that turns into a report you can bring to your vet. It’s free, and it isn’t selling anything.

How bad was the first draft?

Pretty bad, and that’s fine.

On October 3 it was a blank starter template with a spinner on it, and it sat that way for two days while clinic happened. The first real draft went up at 1:27 in the morning on October 5. A painted dog, a ZIP box and one button. Type in a ZIP and it said the forecast was unavailable. That was the whole site.

I’m showing that on purpose. The first version of anything you build this way is supposed to be bad. Its only job is to give you something to react to, and it’s a lot easier to say “no, not like that” to something on the screen than to describe the perfect thing from scratch.

What changed in five days?

Here’s roughly how it went:

• Oct 5, morning. A painting, a plan and three doors: my dog is itchy tonight, why is my dog itchy, and the meds.
• Oct 5, afternoon. A full redesign. Lamplit paintings, real tools, and the words sounding like me instead of a pamphlet. The same day it moved off Lovable onto a small server in my clinic.
• Oct 6. The itch diary. One tap a day turns into an 8-week report I can actually read at the visit. Accounts that work across phone and computer, and a skin photo diary so owners can see two weeks of improvement instead of guessing.
• Oct 7. The book came to life. The itch ladder, the itch bucket, the flea iceberg, a food trial you can play, a game that teaches you to spot a bad supplement ad, and three short videos I narrated myself.
• Oct 8. Painted dogs that move, 48 plain answers written so Google and the AI chatbots send people there, and a new logo. That one took three tries. One version looked like the dog was sneezing out pollen.

None of that was on a plan on October 3. Most of it started with me looking at the site and thinking “that should do this too.”

How do you trust AI with medical advice on a public site?

This is the part I’d want another vet to ask about.

Claude’s first idea was to leave holes all over the site for me to fill in. I went the other way. Let it write everything, then put every medical sentence on a private review page with Approve and Revise buttons. There are 303 of them as of today. If anybody changes an approved sentence later, even by a word, it goes back on my list, and the site shows a draft banner until I’ve signed off on everything.

There’s one more rule. Where the site and my book disagree, the book wins. The book says a food trial runs 10 to 12 weeks. I know 8 is the number that gets quoted, but 10 to 12 gives you wiggle room, and it’s what I tell people in real life. So that’s what the site says too.

It wrote. I signed. That split is what makes me comfortable putting my name on it.

Where did 142 versions come from?

Every time something changed, the whole site was saved, like a save point in a video game. I didn’t set that up to make a video. It’s just how the tools work, and it means nothing is ever really lost.

That’s also how this video exists. The three oldest versions wouldn’t even build anymore, so Claude patched them just enough to run, took screenshots of each one, grabbed today’s live site the same way, and built the video. I looked at the still frames, pointed out that the last scene scrolled into a blank spot, and told it to render. From me asking to the finished file took one afternoon.

Can I build something like this for my clinic?

You can build the one that fixes your problem. Mine was answering the same itchy dog questions over and over, and wanting owners to show up with real data instead of “he’s been scratching a lot.” Yours is probably something different.

Start ugly. Get the bad first draft on the screen, react to it, and keep going. If you get stuck, ask me. That’s what this site is for. And if you have an itchy dog, itchydog.vet is right there.