Building This Site with Claude Code

This site you're reading right now was built with the help of Claude Code, Anthropic's CLI tool for AI-assisted development. I figured the meta angle would make a good first post - documenting how the tool I'm learning about helped me build the platform where I'll write about learning it.

What is Claude Code?

Claude Code is a command-line tool that gives you access to Claude (Anthropic's AI) directly in your terminal. Unlike chatbots that just give you code snippets to copy-paste, Claude Code can actually read your files, write code, run commands, and manage your project. It's like pair programming with an AI that has context about your entire codebase.

The Stack

For this site, I chose:

Next.js 15 with the App Router - modern React with server-side rendering
Tailwind CSS v4 - utility-first CSS that keeps styling close to the markup
shadcn/ui - beautiful, accessible UI components built on Radix
MDX - Markdown with JSX, so blog posts are just files in the repo

What Went Well

The biggest win was speed. Claude Code could scaffold the entire project structure, write components, and wire everything together in a fraction of the time it would take me manually. It understood the relationships between files - when I asked for a blog system, it created the content directory, the utility functions to read MDX files, the listing page, and the individual post page all at once.

The dark theme and design came together quickly too. I described what I wanted ("dark and modern, cyan accent, professional but approachable") and the result matched my mental picture surprisingly well.

What I Learned

Be specific about what you want. Vague instructions lead to generic results. "Make it look professional" is less useful than "dark background, cyan accent color, generous whitespace, clean typography."
Review everything. AI-generated code works, but you need to understand it. I caught a few things that needed adjustment - not bugs exactly, but choices I would have made differently.
The iteration loop is fast. The real power isn't the first draft - it's the speed of revision. "Make the nav sticky" or "add mobile hamburger menu" takes seconds, not minutes.

What's Next

This is just the beginning. I plan to use this site to document:

More Claude Code experiments and configurations
Cybersecurity topics and tools
Infrastructure and homelab projects
Whatever else I'm tinkering with

If you're interested in AI-assisted development or cybersecurity, stick around. There's more coming.

This post is part of a series about AI-assisted development. Next up: Getting Started with Claude Code - installation, first launch, and first impressions.