How I built this blog with agentic coding

i've been meaning to build this blog for a long time.

nothing was stopping me.

i knew what i wanted it to look like. i just kept pushing it back.

work came first, then other projects, then other stuff. so it just sat there for about a year.

then i finally sat down yesterday and did it. took me around 3 hours.

where it started

first i started with the design.

i opened paper and designed what i wanted.

i wanted to keep it simple, so i designed the site that way.

i also cared about how fast it loads.

i wanted good lcp and solid lighthouse scores, as close to perfect as i could get.

so i went with next.js for that.

next is the part i hate the most.

we used to spend hours setting up next.js, tailwind, copying animation code from old projects, losing a whole weekend to it. but now i just open claude code and tell it what i want instead.

how it went

i decided to break the website down into sections and let claude code them one at a time.

that's constant throughout all my agentic coding sessions.

break things into small blocks instead of dumping everything at once.

once things were set up, the next part was the design engineering.

making the animations and the whole site feel right to the reader.

i wanted it to feel calm.

no layout shifts, nothing jumping around while it loads, none of that. just smooth to read.

i said "make the projects row scroll with a soft fade on the edge". it did it.

i looked at it and said "the fade is too strong, make it softer". it fixed it.

for the animations and the little interactions, i used two skills.

one from emil kowalski (/email-design-eng) and one from jakub krehel (/make-interfaces-feel-better).

so the motion actually felt right, instead of me poking at numbers till it looked okay.

we kept going like that. in a few minutes it was basically done.

i also had an old site with some nice animated ui blocks i wanted to reuse, so i pointed claude at that repo and it pulled everything over. that plus a proper blog writing setup so i can write and publish easily, pinned posts, dark mode.

i was just pointing at the things that felt off and claude fixed them.

this shadow, this spacing, this word. and it handled the rest.

what changed

i already use ai for most of my work, so that part is nothing new for me.

what got me is the small stuff.

there's always some side project i never start, or a little tool i keep wishing i had, or a blog i keep saying i'll get to.

that kind of thing always felt like it needed a full weekend, so it just never happened.

this one only took an evening though. so it got done.

and the typing was never really the point. the harder part now is just figuring out what i actually want, and noticing when something feels a bit off. which i don't mind at all.

the final results

and it turned out fast. here's the lighthouse report, the lcp and the rest of the scores i was chasing when i picked next.js.

lighthouse report showing the site's lcp and performance scores

along with that i also added a llms.txt file so agents can easily discover my site! here.

anyway, that's the first post.

if you've got something you keep putting off, it's probably a lot smaller than you think now.

go try it.

more soon.