Claude rebuilt my website while I slept

Howdy wizards,

Two months ago I had a mindset shift.

I realised my job now is taste.

Human currency is now taste. Judgement. Direction.

AI takes care of the execution for us.

It’s your job to figure out what to build.

I’m still discovering what that means to me with every new thing I work on.

It’s easy to think too small and just use AI for a tiny bit of what it can actually do.

This week I applied that thinking when I needed to make an edit to my newsletter’s website.

I use a platform called Beehiiv to send this newsletter. It’s great for email infrastructure.

It also comes bundled with the world’s slowest and clunkiest website builder, and that’s where my site was hosted.

I’ve spent days nagging their customer support just to be able to edit a basic heading.

Apart from dubbed movies, nothing annoys me more than poorly designed UIs.

Two months ago, after years of painstakingly using their annoying builder, I figured out I could use Claude to click around in it for me and do edits!

That seemed smart, at first.

But each edit still took forever because the interface is so bad. And lots of tokens were consumed in the process. That builder also has limitations which make it hard to do cool stuff with JavaScript like interactions and animations.

So I decided to ask Claude Code if it could just…rebuild the thing in code and let me host it myself. Then I would be able to do future edits fast and agentically.

By the way — if you’re looking for a hands-on workshop that will help you get practical skills in Claude Code, you want to check this out:

❦

I know a decent amount about web development.

A rebuild of this kind isn’t just imitating the look of a site.

This kind of work used to be neither quick nor easy. In fact, it used to take a team of people in some cases.

There’s a bunch of interconnected elements that all need to work well: layout, interactivity, automations, signups, site search, SEO, redirects, hosting, monitoring, analytics, and three years of newsletter content.

And I needed it all to work just like the original site.

Skeptical as hell, I asked Claude if I should attempt rebuilding my site.

It came back saying:

“Crappy website builder? Pal, that’s so 2025. You can just switch to custom code. I’ll do it for you.”

(I’m paraphrasing a bit)

I didn’t doubt Claude could do it. I just didn’t actually think it would do it well. At least not without a lot of back and forth and hours of my time.

I was almost sure it’d mess everything up, or come back with a lousy version that looks like slop of the highest purity.

I asked it to plan everything and then just implement it end to end, and test it after.

Then I went to sleep.

The next day, to my surprise, it had worked continuously for almost six hours. It was just wrapping up its work when I checked.

I almost choked on my coffee.

It had migrated the whole thing with pixel-perfect accuracy, and everything worked smoothly.

I had a website which is now fully custom code, built by Claude:

Just me prompting Claude about what I want, and it creating it for me, fast and free.

Some things I asked Claude to implement on the first day of my new agent-first site:

I’m glad I didn’t attempt to migrate my site earlier, before the models got this good. I would’ve spent a lot of time and effort just to get a half-good result.

Whereas now the work was done while I was sleeping instead.

95% of managing my website is now done for me.

That means I can focus fully on the 5% that’s left:

Deciding what gets built.

❦

You are a delight.

Dario

Disclosure: To cover the cost of my email software and the time I spend writing this newsletter, I sometimes work with sponsors and may earn a commission if you buy something through a link in here. If you choose to click, subscribe, or buy through any of them, THANK YOU – it will make it possible for me to continue to do this.