RichClegg

Build a site like this with AI

Build a site like this with AI

How I built this portfolio with Claude Code, plain CloudFormation and a keyless GitHub Actions pipeline. Four parts, with every snippet in the posts, running on the AWS Free Tier.

This site is a static Astro site on Amazon S3 and CloudFront. GitHub Actions deploys it on every push, with no AWS keys stored anywhere, and the resume page and the PDF resume are generated from the same JSON file. I built it in a weekend with Claude Code doing most of the typing, and I run three other small apps on the same setup.

This series shows how, in the order I would do it again. The CloudFormation stacks live in a private infrastructure repo, so each post includes the snippets that matter. The other apps are public if you want to see a small working example:

From a push to a published page: GitHub, Actions, an AWS role assumed through OIDC, a sync to a private S3 bucket and CloudFront.

How I used AI

I worked in a Claude Code project and gave each goal its own thread: one to organize my repos and build the deploy pipeline, one for this site, and one per hobby app. Threads kept the context small and let the infrastructure work and the design work run side by side.

Three habits made the difference:

  1. I set the constraints up front. Everything is infrastructure as code in plain CloudFormation, no long-lived keys, and it has to fit in the free tier. Claude checked its plans against those rules instead of drifting toward whatever was quickest.
  2. I asked for options before code. For the design I asked to see options side by side as screenshots before anything was built. That saved more time than any prompt trick.
  3. I made it verify. The AI read the AWS docs for current free tier terms, ran the deploys, and took screenshots of its own pages to critique them. When a deploy failed, it read the GitHub Actions logs and fixed the pipeline.

What it costs

On a new AWS account you get up to $200 in credits and a free plan that lasts six months. CloudFront’s always-free allowance, 1 TB of transfer and 10 million requests a month, covers a personal site indefinitely. S3 storage and requests are the only part not covered forever, and for a few megabytes of HTML that comes to a few cents a month. CloudFormation, IAM and the OIDC provider are free.

Check the current terms. AWS changed the Free Tier for accounts created after July 15, 2025. Older accounts stay on the previous program. See the AWS Free Tier page for what applies to yours.

The parts

  1. Host a static site on S3 and CloudFront
  2. Keyless AWS deploys with GitHub OIDC
  3. One file for the resume page and the PDF
  4. What I learned designing it with AI

Start with part one if you only want hosting.