I’ve been using Carrd for my personal website for years. It’s a great tool, genuinely. If you need a simple, good-looking single-page site and you’re not a developer, Carrd is one of the best options out there. I’ve recommended it to clients. I’ve built sites for friends on it.
But I’d been bumping up against its limits for a while. I wanted a blog. I wanted multiple pages. I wanted to stop paying for something I could probably host for free. And honestly, I wanted to see if I could actually build a real website myself, using AI.
So I did.
What I’m not
I should say this upfront: I am not a developer. I don’t write code for a living. I run a consulting firm that helps progressive nonprofit organizations with operations and technology. I know my way around a Google Workspace admin console and can usually figure out why someone’s Zoom isn’t working, but I’m not sitting here writing JavaScript in my spare time.
What I am is someone who’s been using Claude Code for the past few months to build things I never could have built on my own. Automations, internal tools, even full web applications. It’s Anthropic’s command-line AI coding tool, and I’ve gotten comfortable enough with it to rebuild my own website from the ground up.
What actually happened
Here’s the short version: I sat down with Claude Code, gave it the exported HTML and CSS from my Carrd site, and said “let’s rebuild this as an Astro static site that deploys on Cloudflare Pages.”
And then we did. In one session.
The new site has multiple pages (a real About page, a Projects page, a Blog), a blog system with tags and an RSS feed, a “Building in Public” series page (you’re reading the first post right now), and a working contact form that emails me through a Cloudflare Worker. It’s hosted for free on Cloudflare Pages, with self-hosted fonts, and it auto-deploys whenever I push to GitHub.
Was it perfect on the first try? No. There was a lot of back-and-forth. Adjusting spacing, restoring personality that got lost in translation, fixing links that didn’t go anywhere. But the core of the site went from “Carrd export in a zip file” to “live on Cloudflare” in a single sitting.
Why I’m writing about this
Most of what I see written about AI coding tools comes from developers showing off technical feats, or from hype pieces about how AI will replace everyone’s job tomorrow. I don’t see a lot of people in my situation talking about it: someone who isn’t a developer, who has a regular job, and who’s using these tools to do things that would have been impractical (or just very expensive) to hire out before.
So I’m going to document the projects I build with Claude Code. What works, what breaks, what I’d tell someone else who’s thinking about trying it. No code tutorials, no prompt engineering tricks. Just an honest account of what it’s like to build stuff with AI when you’re not a developer.
What’s next
I’ve got a few projects I’ll be writing about here. Some are for my consulting business, some are personal experiments, and some are things I’ve been curious about for years but never had the technical chops to build myself.
If you want to follow along, subscribe to my newsletter or check the Building in Public page. I’ll be tagging all the posts in this series so they collect there.