Tools · AI · Personal

How Claude Built My Website in 15 Minutes (and Then Wrote This Blog Too)

June 2026 · 6 min read

Let me be upfront: I am a backend engineer. My mental model lives in data pipelines, execution engines, and distributed systems. Five years building trading infrastructure — at WealthWisers, then Finpeg, now QuantInsti — and the thing I've touched least in all that time is a frontend framework. CSS has always been someone else's department.

So when I finally decided to build a proper personal website — not a Google Sites placeholder, not a half-finished template — I knew I wasn't going to do it the hard way. I opened Claude Code, Anthropic's CLI coding assistant, described what I wanted, and let it run.

The brief

No repo, no scaffolded project, no Figma file. Just a conversation. I told Claude: clean, professional personal site — not a neon-green developer portfolio. Pages for work, projects, resume, blog, and a products section. Dark by default, but respect the user's system theme. Editorial, not flashy.

Claude's first move was to pick a stack and justify it: Next.js 16 with the App Router, Tailwind CSS v4, TypeScript, fully static export for zero-cost Vercel deployment. Then it asked a handful of sharp questions — visual vibe, which sections, did I have resume PDFs. I answered, shared two resume variants, and it got to work.

15 minutes

The first working site took around 15 minutes. Not a skeleton — a deployed-quality static site with six routes, my real work history pulled from the PDF, a dark theme with WCAG-compliant contrast ratios, system-based light/dark mode via pure CSS (no JavaScript, no flash on load), and a fully responsive mobile layout.

The architecture was thoughtful too: CSS custom properties for theming so every color is one variable, a single data.ts file as the content source of truth so I never touch JSX to update my experience, and static export so hosting costs nothing. These are choices a senior engineer would make deliberately, not defaults you fall into.

What I actually did

Here's the honest version: I wasn't just watching.

When the first design felt too much like a developer portfolio with badges and terminal animations, I pushed back. Claude reworked it. When the dark mode text was hard to read — certain foreground colors had only 2.9:1 contrast on the dark background, well below WCAG AA's 4.5:1 minimum — I flagged it. Claude recalculated the entire color system. When the products page copy made it sound like I hadn't shipped anything in five years, I told Claude to reframe it: I've built production systems at three companies, and my personal tools are in testing. It rewrote the page.

Every direction call was mine. Every taste judgment was mine. Claude had the execution speed. That's the combination that made it work — I had the domain knowledge and the sense of what should feel right, Claude had the ability to turn that into working, production-quality code faster than I could Google "how does CSS grid work on mobile."

For other backend people

If you're reading this as someone who lives on the server side — data engineers, quant developers, backend engineers who've always treated the frontend as someone else's problem — this probably resonates. The knowledge gap isn't about intelligence. It's about not having spent 10,000 hours with the right tools.

Claude Code didn't remove the need to think. It removed the friction of not knowing which CSS property handles responsive breakpoints, or how Next.js App Router's file-based routing works, or what "WCAG AA contrast" actually means in hex values. I could focus on direction and judgment. Claude handled translation into code.

The website you're on right now is the output. Every page, every layout decision, every color variable — built in a single session. And yes, this blog post too: I gave Claude the outline and the points I wanted to hit, it wrote the prose, I edited what didn't sound like me.

The stack, if you're curious

• –Next.js 16 — App Router, fully static export
• –Tailwind CSS v4 — new @import syntax, no config file needed
• –TypeScript throughout
• –Pure CSS theming — prefers-color-scheme media query, zero JS
• –Deployed on Vercel, domain at iamcktyagi.com

What's next

I'll be writing more here — mostly on trading systems, data engineering, and occasionally on using AI as a force multiplier for engineers who aren't web developers. The pattern of direction + taste + Claude = leverage is one I'm applying across more than just websites.

If that sounds useful, follow along on Medium or check back here.