This website, built in conversation with Claude Code

I described what I wanted, and one Claude Code session did the work. It mocked up several directions as real pages so I could compare them, then built the one I picked. Every change came back for review with a private preview link and steps to try it on my phone. When it looked right, I said “ship it”.

1. 1Pre-rendered by default. Every page is plain HTML built ahead of time, and the live site has no server code at all today: nothing to keep running, and fast everywhere.
2. 2Server code only where a key must stay secret. The demos (built, not live yet) need API keys, so they’ll be the only server routes, each with per-visitor limits and a daily cap on spending.
3. 3Cookieless visitor counts. Vercel’s own analytics instead of Google Analytics, so there’s no cookie banner, at the cost of less detail about each visit.
4. 4Nothing loads from other websites. Logos are drawn into the page at build time and fonts are self-hosted. Next.js’s built-in font loader was tried and dropped: its fallback font had no bold weight, so a slow font load turned every heading thin.

Taste is still the job. The AI produced options quickly, and most of my time went into saying which headline sounded like me and which read like a template.

When something didn’t work, like the visitor counter that recorded nothing at first, the useful move was to show the AI exactly what I saw. A screenshot found the cause faster than a description.