Build a site like this with AI, part 4 of 4

What I learned designing it with AI

Two themes and a fork later, I went back to an early version. Content and positioning mattered more than the theme.

This site went through several looks in two days, and you’re reading one of the earliest. Here’s what the detours taught me.

The detours

Claude Code’s first pass from my resume was plain Astro. The second added a navy page with an orange accent, stat tiles and cards. It worked, but I asked for something more sophisticated.

Next, Claude built open source themes locally with my content and showed me screenshots side by side. I picked astro-erudite, and Claude restyled it with Anthropic’s frontend-design skill, which steers the model away from the habits that make pages look generated. Then I tried a fork of Brittany Chiang’s v4, which she allows with credit.

Each one looked good. None of them fixed what was actually wrong.

What was actually wrong

The home page didn’t say who I am to the people I want to reach. I’m a consultant at an AWS partner, and visitors should learn in a few seconds what I build for clients and what that has achieved. Once I gave that brief, the changes were mostly content: a headline about data platforms on AWS, the tools I work with, and examples of the work. Those worked in any theme, so I went back to the version I liked best. I also tried an architecture diagram on the home page and removed it. It implied I was selling a solution, and I wanted a list of tools and examples instead.

What I’d do again

• Write the brief before asking for a design. “Too bland” leaves the AI guessing. “Position me as an AWS data consultant” doesn’t.
• Ask for screenshots, not descriptions. Claude Code can run a headless browser, build each option and capture it. Deciding from pictures is fast.
• Let the AI critique its own work. After each change it took screenshots in light mode, dark mode and at phone width, and caught problems like cropped diagrams before I saw them.
• Respect licenses. Read the README and the license before reusing a design. Some authors ask for credit, and some fonts in public repos aren’t free to use.
• Keep a branch of every detour. None of the work was lost, and some of it, like this blog, came back.