I recently rebuilt my personal website using Claude Code, and the experience was genuinely different from traditional web development. Not better or worse in every way, just different enough to be worth writing about.
The Starting Point
I wanted a simple personal website: a home page, an about section with my CV, and a blog for occasional writing. Nothing complicated. The tech stack would be Hugo for static site generation, GitHub for version control, and FTP deployment to my hosting provider.
What I didn’t want was to spend hours reading documentation about Hugo themes, debugging deployment scripts, or fighting with configuration files.
How It Actually Worked
Claude Code operates as a command-line tool with access to your file system. You describe what you want, and it writes and executes code to make it happen. The crucial difference from chatbots is that it actually does the work: creating files, running commands, making commits.
For the initial setup, I described the basic structure I wanted. Within minutes, I had a Hugo site with the PaperMod theme configured, content directories set up, and a working GitHub Actions deployment pipeline.
Where things got interesting was the iterative refinement. I could say “move the logos to the same line as the company names” or “add a LinkedIn icon that works in both light and dark mode” and watch it implement the changes, commit them, and push to the repository. When something didn’t work (a logo not displaying, the wrong directory for FTP uploads) I’d share the error output and it would diagnose and fix the issue.
The Rough Edges
This wasn’t a flawless experience. The FTP deployment took several attempts to get right. Authentication was failing silently, directory paths were wrong, and debugging required going back and forth with error logs. At one point we created an uppercase directory that the server didn’t recognise because it was case-sensitive.
I also had to be specific about what I wanted. “Make it look better” doesn’t work. “Increase the profile picture size to 180 pixels and add 20 pixels of padding to the company logos” does.
What Actually Changed
The traditional approach would have been: read Hugo documentation, find a theme, configure it, write deployment scripts, debug each piece separately. Probably half a day to get something basic working, more to refine it.
With Claude Code, I had a working site deployed in under an hour. More importantly, the iteration cycle was fast enough that I actually bothered to refine details I would have otherwise left alone. Consistent logo sizing, proper dark mode support for icons, centred layouts. Small things that add up but rarely survive contact with a “good enough for now” mindset.
The downside is understanding. When Claude Code writes a custom FTP deployment script in Python, I can read it and roughly follow what it’s doing, but I didn’t build that mental model through struggle. If something breaks in a new way six months from now, I’ll need to relearn how it works.
Is This the Future?
I’ve been tinkering with personal websites for years, from hand-coded HTML in the early days through various WordPress installations. Each approach has taught me something different about how the web works, even when the end result was a site I barely maintained.
Claude Code is a different tool with different trade-offs. For straightforward tasks where you know what you want, it’s remarkably efficient. For learning something new or building deep expertise, the speed might actually work against you.
What I can say is that for building a personal website, something I’ve rebuilt more times than I care to admit, this was the fastest path from idea to deployed site I’ve experienced. Whether that matters depends on what you’re optimising for.