← Back to Musings

I don’t write HTML. I don’t write CSS. And yet the site you’re reading this on — every page, every photo gallery, every timeline entry — was built by me, with Claude doing the typing.

That sentence needs some unpacking, because “built by me” and “Claude doing the typing” sound like they’re in tension. They’re not, and the space between them is really what this post is about.

I actually first heard of GitHub through a class I was taking on Applied Statistics — though I didn’t start actually using it until later in that same class. That class is also where I learned about Claude. Between the two, I got curious: could I put them together and build an academic site of my own?

Starting with content, not code

The first thing we did wasn’t design a homepage. It was sit down with my resume — a Word document with some genuinely confusing nested tables — and pull it apart into something a website could use: education, professional experience, achievements, credentials. That’s the part that actually took thought, and it was mine. Claude couldn’t decide which two bullet points best represented eight years as a department chair, or whether “operationalized” was the right verb for standing up a simulation center after a building was finished. I could.

Once the content existed, Claude built the pages around it — a black-and-white academic layout with a warm terracotta accent, a photography gallery with a lightbox, an achievements page organized year by year. I didn’t write a line of the code that makes any of that work. I looked at what it produced, on a real screen, at real size, and said what I liked and what I didn’t.

The workflow: two folders and a safety net

Here’s the part that surprised me most. My site lives in two places on my computer: a folder where I keep the working files, and a separate folder that GitHub Desktop manages — the actual repository that gets published. Every change gets made in both places, and then I review the difference — line by line, if I want to — before I commit and push it live myself.

That last part matters to me. Claude never publishes anything. It stages the change, shows me what changed, and I’m the one who pulls the trigger in GitHub Desktop. If I ever wanted to undo something, the entire history is sitting right there in git, changeset by changeset, going back to the first page I ever built. I didn’t understand version control going into this. I understand it now mostly because it quietly saved me the one time I wanted to see what a page looked like before a color change I’d asked for.

Where AI actually helped — and where it didn’t

The honest version of this story isn’t “AI built my website.” It’s closer to: AI removed the parts of building a website that had nothing to do with what I actually wanted to say, and left the parts that did squarely in my hands.

Claude was genuinely useful for things like: turning a rough idea into three concrete wording options and letting me pick or correct them, catching that a “detailed illustration” would turn into an unrecognizable smear at actual favicon size before I wasted time finding that out the hard way, and doing the unglamorous, error-prone work of resizing forty-some photos to consistent dimensions without me ever opening an image editor.

It was much less useful — deliberately so — for anything that involved my judgment about myself. When I wanted a sentence to say I’d developed an educational framework based on a simulation model to address a faculty shortage, and not a “staffing solution,” I had to correct that more than once before it was actually true to what I’d done. Claude will write a plausible-sounding sentence about your career. Only you know if it’s the accurate sentence.

What I’d tell someone else trying this

If you’re an educator or a researcher thinking about a personal site and the only thing stopping you is “I don’t know how to code” — that’s no longer really the barrier it used to be. What I’d say instead is: know what you want to say before you start, and stay in the loop on every piece of wording and every image that goes up under your name. The tool can build the page. It shouldn’t decide what the page says about you.

There’s something almost fitting about the fact that this post — a reflection on the tool that helped build this site — was itself co-authored with Claude, starting as a draft and settled on together. That’s the whole workflow, really, captured in one post.

← Back to Musings