Redesigning My Site with Claude Code

April 11, 2026

I've been meaning to clean up this website for a while. It worked, it said what I wanted it to say, but it looked like something I threw together in an afternoon, because that's exactly what it was. The dark gray header and footer, the basic layout, the inconsistent styling across pages. It was functional but it wasn't something I was excited to share.

The thing is, I know how to fix it. I've been writing HTML and CSS for years. But this is the kind of task that always falls to the bottom of the list. It's not hard, it's just tedious enough that I never want to sit down and do it. So it sat there, looking the way it looked, for months.

I ended up redesigning the whole thing from my phone using Claude Code. I was on the couch, not at a desk, and I didn't open a laptop at any point. I just described what I wanted and worked through changes conversationally. The whole thing took maybe an hour.

What surprised me wasn't really the output. The new CSS is fine, the layout is cleaner, the pages are consistent now. What surprised me was how much it felt like the task just stopped being in my way. I'd been avoiding this for a long time not because it was complex but because it was the kind of work that's just boring enough to never prioritize. And suddenly it was done.

There were a few moments during the session where I changed my mind. I had it add a scheduling link, then decided I didn't want it. I asked it to remove the link everywhere. Merge conflicts came up when production had diverged and those got resolved too. Each time I just said what I wanted in plain language and moved on. I didn't have to context-switch into "developer mode" to deal with any of it.

I want to be honest about this because it connects back to something I wrote about in my first post: authenticity. I didn't hand-craft every pixel of this redesign. But the decisions were all mine. I chose the direction. I reviewed what came back. I pushed back when something didn't feel right. The result looks like what I wanted the site to look like and that's what matters to me.

The part I keep thinking about is the friction. Or the lack of it. I've shipped plenty of side projects over the years and the pattern is always the same: the interesting work gets done and then the cleanup sits in a branch for six months. This time the cleanup happened the same day I thought about it, from my phone, without any of the usual resistance. I don't know exactly what to make of that yet but it feels like something worth paying attention to.

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