I wanted something of my own, next to my job: a place to share what I build and what I learn. I also wanted to test something. How far can AI go on a real project?
So I built this site in one evening with Claude Code. First commit at 20:41, last one at 00:01. Eighteen commits later, the site was live on mehmetcinar.com.
How we split the work
Claude edited the files, searched the web and measured the results. I made the decisions, ran the commands and reviewed every change before it went in.
That split is the point. I stayed in the loop: I understood every step and kept control of my own project. When the AI does everything, you end up lost in your own code.
The steps
- Start from a theme. AstroPaper, an open-source blog theme for Astro.
- Clean up. Remove the demo posts and the files I did not need.
- Design. Colours inspired by Vercel: neutral greys and one blue, only for links.
- Measure. The theme promises a Lighthouse score of 100 everywhere. That is true on its home page, not on a post. Code comments were hard to read, some links had no name for screen readers, and a missing icon caused an error. After the fixes: 100 in accessibility, best practices and SEO.
- Write. An About page, a Projects page and my first post.
- Deploy. Cloudflare Workers. Every push to
maingoes live, and every other branch gets its own preview URL.
Where the AI was wrong
To build previews, Claude told me to use wrangler versions upload. The Cloudflare dashboard
asked for something else: wrangler preview. Cloudflare had launched a new Previews feature a
month earlier.
I asked Claude to check. It searched, found the new documentation and fixed the configuration. The lesson: an AI’s knowledge has a date. When something does not match, make it read the current docs.
Where I said no
The font. Claude switched the site to Geist, Vercel’s typeface. It worked, but I did not like it. I kept the theme’s original font, with the Vercel colours.
The tooling. Claude proposed two tools to enforce the format of my commit messages. For a personal site with one author, that is too much. One line in the agent guide does the job.
AI often over-engineers. So do I, to be honest. The hard part is keeping it simple.
What it cost
- Domain: $10.46 a year
- Hosting: free, on Cloudflare
- Claude Code: my existing subscription
- Time: one evening
My verdict
AI is a fast pair programmer, not an autopilot. I let it write the code, never decide what my site says or how it looks.
The stack
- Astro 7 with the AstroPaper theme
- Tailwind CSS, with Vercel-inspired colour tokens
- Cloudflare Workers, deployed on every push
- bun
- Claude Code