I’ve been a designer for over thirteen years. I’ve handed off hundreds of specs to developers, watched them build things I designed, and spent a lot of time explaining exactly what I meant. I always knew what I wanted. I just couldn’t build it myself.
I’ve tried to learn to code more times than I can count. The syntax never stuck. The logic felt foreign. Commands I’d look up one day were gone from my head the next. That’s not laziness, that’s just how ADD works for me. My memory doesn’t hold that kind of detail, and no amount of tutorials or bootcamp-style grinding was going to change that. I’d get halfway through a lesson, lose the thread, and start over. I wanted to be able to say what I wanted and have it happen. That’s not how learning to code works, at least not traditionally.
So I stayed on Squarespace. And Wordpress. And I made them work, but I always knew I was building inside a box that wasn’t mine. I could see the site I wanted and I couldn’t get there.
Then the tools got good enough that I could try again.
This site was built over 20 days in February using Claude Code. 73 sessions. Over 53,000 messages. I didn’t write most of the code. But I made every decision.
It was not a simple process. The biggest frustration wasn’t learning the tools, it was trusting them. Claude would tell me something was fixed. It wasn’t. I’d push back, it would try again, same result. What saved me was knowing enough CSS and HTML to open the browser, inspect what was actually happening, and give more precise direction. I wasn’t debugging code, I was debugging communication. You still need to know enough to close that gap.
The tools are not a set-and-forget system. You still need taste. You still need to understand how things are built, not deeply, but enough. Enough to know when something is wrong. Enough to describe what you want with enough specificity that the tool can act on it. Tokens, typography scales, semantic structure, accessibility, information architecture, none of that goes away. The AI doesn’t have opinions about whether your type scale feels right. You do. That’s still the job.
What changed is the barrier. I built a CMY subtractive color system, a fluid token architecture, a Three.js hero canvas with four dot arrangement generators, GSAP text reveals with chromatic trail effects. I could not have written that code. But I conceived it, directed it, iterated on it, and threw out what didn’t feel right. That process took 20 days because craft still takes time, it just takes different time now.
The moment it clicked was somewhere around when the hero canvas started doing what I’d imagined. Three layers of dots, cyan, magenta, yellow, overlapping with multiply blending so they mixed like ink. I’d had that idea clearly in my head for months and had no way to make it real. Then it was real. That feeling was specific: not pride exactly, more like relief. Like finally being able to say something you’ve been trying to say for a long time.
I’ve always been able to design the thing. Now I can build it too. That’s not a small deal for me.