I got Claude Code to build this website and here are my thoughts

Everyone in my feed was saying Claude Code was going to take over my job. So I gave it one.

Claude Code is an autonomous AI agent that can write and edit files directly in the codebase, much like a full-time developer would do. When it launched last year, it quickly gained popularity and impressive anecdotes started flooding my news feed - Claude Code can do everything and human software developers were no longer needed! To put that claim to the test, I had Claude Code build out the Wholistic AI website, which is my personal tech blog and portfolio. It would code, design, and create content for the website. This post is a documentation of that process.

Website Architecture

I wanted to make sure that my website was built on a good foundation that would accomplish what I wished to do with it. I wanted it to support dynamic and interactive posts, its content must be easy to manage, and be financially sustainable. Picking the right technologies was a key decision that I wasn't comfortable with completely outsourcing to the AI yet. Bad technology choices compound. They cap what you can build and how easy it is to get something from conception to production. Switching to a more suitable technology is a painful, time-consuming endeavor I want to avoid. But in hindsight, I could have had a conversation with Claude first to explore and bounce ideas around - that could have been a good starting point to discover new technologies that could be a better fit.

With that in mind, I picked the following technologies - click on any of them to learn more about that choice:

My Claude Code Experience

With the core technologies picked out, it is time to start coding my website up - or more accurately, get Claude Code to start coding for me.

After the entire development process, this is how the final Wholistic AI website looks like:

Final Thoughts

Can Claude Code take over my job? It is a great tool, even a companion, in the creation of this website. It automated away all the boring, repetitive bits of coding, reducing my dev time from days into hours, even minutes in some cases. It gave me great feedback on my creative work. If you just want to create something that is standard and can pass as publishable, Claude Code can probably do the job with little to no guidance. If you just see software engineering as writing code that works, designing as producing a set of reasonable visuals, and writing as stringing together a bunch of grammatically correct words, AI can take over the job. But if you see software engineering as building an elegantly designed system that can keep things simple and stand the test of time, designing as a way to distinguish yourself visually, and writing as a way to think deeper and express human truths in words, AI is not a replacement. At most, it is a companion that you can bounce ideas off from, but the main insights have to come from you. You have to give it the raw material. LLMs are configured to behave according to existing information that it is already trained on. I think a world run by LLMs alone will eventually grow stale over time. It can only refine what is already there, not elevate your work to a new dimension.

And even if AI could produce what we wanted from scratch, do we want it to? The design and content parts of this process remind me of the quote "In the process of creating something, we also create ourselves." Even if I wasn't able to save time on the design and content creation, I don't consider it a loss. In fact, the process of designing the logo, look, theme of Wholistic AI manually made me sit down and think about what Wholistic AI is all about and what I really want to accomplish through this initiative. That in turn led me to think about what I enjoy about working in the data, ML, and software world and what I want to do with it. Writing this blog post made me think deeper about my experience creating this website and the deeper lessons behind it. Discovering ourselves and how we fit in the world around is not something AI can automate away - and I don't think we want it to.