Table of Contents
I built this site in a single Claude Code session. Not a toy demo — a fully styled Astro blog with dark mode, search, RSS, OG image generation, reading time, table of contents, and a Cloudflare Pages deploy pipeline.
Why build a blog at all
I’ve spent 25+ years building systems for other people. Healthcare platforms, distributed backends, AI-powered workflows. The work is interesting, but it lives behind NDAs and enterprise walls. A blog gives me a place to share the patterns without the proprietary details.
The agentic approach
Rather than scaffolding piece by piece, I described the full vision — design direction, content structure, tech stack, deployment target — and worked with Claude Code as an architecture partner. The process looked like:
- Plan the system — not just “make me a blog” but a detailed spec covering typography, color palette, content schema, URL structure, and deployment
- Scaffold and restyle — start from a solid template (astro-theme-cactus), then systematically restyle every layer
- Iterate on details — code blocks, tag pills, reading time, TOC behavior, dark mode colors
What made this work wasn’t the AI writing code faster. It was the ability to hold the entire project context — design system, content model, deployment target — and make consistent decisions across dozens of files without losing the thread.
What I’d do differently
Start with content. I spent time perfecting the design before I had real posts to test it against. Next time I’d write two or three real articles first, then build the site around how they actually read.
The broader point
Agentic development isn’t autocomplete. It’s a different way of working — one where the human focuses on decisions and direction, and the AI handles the translation into implementation. The leverage comes from clarity of intent, not speed of typing.
More posts coming on the specific patterns that make this work well.