Created with Claude

• Technical setup — configs, dependencies, Astro/Tailwind/GSAP conventions.
• Boilerplate — 12 multilingual page stubs in 2 minutes.
• Types & Zod schemas — never a TypeScript syntax error.
• Known patterns — Lenis smooth scroll, ScrollTrigger, image optim.
• Documentary writing — skills, READMEs, commit messages.
• Coherent multi-file refactor.
• Visual exploration (Claude Design) — layout directions, palette, components — before committing to code.

One morning, I ask it for a status report on the project from a routine’s logs. It hands me a perfectly confident checklist: Git remote missing, zero secured links, case studies still placeholders. All false — it had read a truncated file and filled the gaps on its own, without saying so.

What matters is what came next. I ask it to verify for real. It reopens the files, measures, and rewrites its own checklist flagging its mistakes: remote OK, links already secured, content real and complete.

This is exactly what working with an AI is. It never tires, but it never doubts enough — my job is to doubt in its place. An AI you verify stays an accelerator. An AI you take at its word becomes a risk.

The hero went through three rounds this week — a scrolling marquee of keywords, a signature underline beneath my name, graphic corner marks like a photo studio’s viewfinder. Three additions in pure CSS, animated in sequence. On paper, done.

Except. The marquee looped with a visible gap on wide screens — the translateX(-50%) technique requires each half of the track to exceed the viewport’s width, and on a 27-inch monitor, five keywords weren’t enough. The underline beneath “Belleudy” was drawn at an approximate width — visually almost right, but not quite. And shrinking the browser window down to tablet size on a desktop (with a mouse, therefore) made the cursor vanish entirely — the native one hidden, the custom one hidden too, nothing left on screen.

I caught all three of these myself — a screenshot for the first, an eyeballed comparison for the second, a plain window-resize test for the third. Claude Code had spotted none of them: the code “worked,” in the sense that nothing crashed. Directing the AI here mostly meant testing like a user, not like a linter.

Directing the AI is directing yourself. The clearer the brief, the more accurate the result. When I fumble, Claude Code fumbles. When I know, it ships.

The designer isn’t replaced. The friction is. The time I gain is the time I used to spend waiting, translating, explaining. Not the time of conception.

Skills are a form of design. Encoding my conventions in .claude/skills/ means inscribing my method into the project. Tomorrow, if someone picks up the repo, they’ll have my way of thinking at hand.

CLAUDE.md is the most important object in the project. More important than the package.json. Without it, every session would restart from zero.

It’s not a replacement, it’s an amplifier. It doesn’t make you a better designer. It makes you a designer who ships more, faster, without compromising on quality — provided you know exactly what you want.

AI changed my execution speed. It didn’t change how I think through a project.

The brief, the strategy, the visual identity, the structural decisions — all of that stays human. What AI replaces is the time between intention and code. What it doesn’t replace: knowing which code to write.

If someone offers you a complete site in 5 minutes with AI: ask how they chose the color. And why that color will resonate with your audience.