Knowing what RebelSites is doing while it builds helps you prompt better and intervene at the right moments. The whole pipeline runs in a few clear phases, each visible in the progress timeline at the top of the chat.
The blueprint is the AI's design brief. Based on your prompt, it picks a brand name (or reuses what you supplied), settles on a color palette, chooses a typographic direction, and locks in an overall content tone. This is also where it decides on the visual aesthetic from a small library of distinct design styles. By the time the blueprint is finished, the look and personality of the site are largely set.
If you care about a specific direction, the blueprint phase is where it pays to be detailed in your initial prompt. Asking for a clean, modern site with warm earth tones steers the blueprint differently than asking for a punchy, high-contrast site with neon accents.
Next the AI plans which pages your site will have. For most local service businesses this is a Home page plus pages for Services, About, and Contact, but the exact list depends on what your prompt implies. A multi-location business might get a Locations page. A trade with several distinct service lines might get a separate page per service. You can always add or remove pages later by asking in chat.
With the blueprint and the page list in hand, the AI builds each page in turn. Files stream into the preview as they are generated, so you will see the header appear, then the hero, then the sections under it, one after another. Each page is its own focused generation, which is why the AI can keep individual pages tight and intentional rather than producing one huge generic template.
Once the files are written, RebelSites installs dependencies and starts a real Astro development server in a sandbox container. The preview pane on the right is that running site, not a screenshot. You can click links, scroll, and resize the preview to test mobile behavior.
When you ask for a change later, the AI runs an edit operation rather than rebuilding from scratch. It identifies the smallest set of files that need to change, makes a focused modification, and updates the preview. This keeps iteration fast and protects work you are happy with from accidental rewrites.
Phases are not just bookkeeping. The blueprint phase is where the design language is decided, so corrections about overall feel work best either in the initial prompt or as a follow-up edit before too many pages have been refined. Page-level adjustments are best made once you can see the full site, so wait for the build to finish before piling on changes. And edits land most reliably one focused chunk at a time, since the AI handles one well-scoped change much more cleanly than five different things tangled into a single message.
