I’ve used Carrd for my personal website for years. It’s a great tool. If you need a simple single-page site and you’re not a developer, Carrd is one of the best options out there. I’ve recommended it to clients.
But I’d been hitting its limits for a while. I wanted a blog and more than one page. I wanted to stop paying for something I could probably host for free. And honestly, I wanted to see if I could build a real website myself, using AI.
So I did.
What I’m not
I am not a developer. 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 I can usually figure out why someone’s Zoom isn’t working. But I don’t write JavaScript in my spare time.
For the past few months, though, I’ve been using Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line AI coding tool. With it I’ve built things I never could have built on my own: automations, internal tools, even full web applications.
What actually happened
I gave Claude Code the exported HTML and CSS from my Carrd site. Then I said “let’s rebuild this as an Astro static site that deploys on Cloudflare Pages.”
And we did, in one session.
The new site has real pages: About, Projects, and a Blog with tags and an RSS feed. There’s a “Building in Public” series page (you’re reading the first post right now). A contact form emails me through a Cloudflare Worker. It’s hosted for free on Cloudflare Pages and 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 read about AI coding tools comes from developers showing off, or from hype about AI taking everyone’s job tomorrow. I don’t see many people in my situation writing about it. I’m not a developer, and I have a regular job. I use these tools for things that would have been impractical (or just very expensive) to hire out.
So I’m going to document what I build with Claude Code: what works, what breaks, and what I’d tell someone thinking about trying it. No code tutorials, no prompt engineering tricks. Just an honest account.
What’s next
Some of the projects I’ll write about are for my consulting business. Some are personal experiments. Some are things I’ve been curious about for years but never had the technical chops to build.
If you want to follow along, subscribe to my newsletter or check the Building in Public page. I’ll tag every post in this series so they collect there.