I Built a 974-HOA Directory With an AI Agent — and I Didn’t Write Code

I didn’t set out to build a website. I set out to answer a question buyers keep getting blindsided by: what are you actually buying into when you buy into an HOA?

Dues, special assessments, legal fights, reserve health — most of that is buried, scattered, or just not shown before closing. So I asked Muse to help me build the thing I wished existed.

I didn’t write code. I gave directions, in plain English, one task at a time.

Muse researched HOAs, built a database, scored them for risk, and imported them into WordPress as individual profiles. I checked the work, corrected it when it was wrong, and pushed back when a draft sounded like AI. That loop — I direct, Muse builds, I verify — is the whole workflow.

The result is hoagrades.com: 974 HOA profiles. 968 are published live. Of the ones with enough data to score, 618 are Low risk, 50 Moderate, and 3 Elevated.

What surprised me most wasn’t the speed. It was how much of the work was judgment, not typing: deciding what counts as verified, what stays out if we can’t prove it, and never letting a score be bought or paid to rank higher. The agent did the heavy lifting. The calls were still mine.

That’s how I use Muse: not to replace thinking, but to turn a one-line idea into something real, faster than I could do it alone.

Next up, I’ll show the morning routine version of this — the daily brief, emails, and calendar, run in about 10 minutes.