Behind the build
How we built this website with AI
Ten days from content plan to launch: an Astro theme, Claude Code as a pair programmer, and a senior developer deciding what ships.
This website went from first commit to launch in ten days, between September 27 and October 6, 2026. Every change after the initial commit was made together with Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool. We tell clients that we build with AI and that a senior developer still designs, reviews and tests every line. This post shows what that looks like on a project you can click through yourself.
Content before code
The first thing I wrote wasn’t code but a content plan: one Markdown document with the positioning, every page and its copy, the cases we could show and a list of open questions. It also records decisions as they’re made, with a date, so nobody has to remember why something is the way it is.
That document turned out to be the most useful thing I gave the AI. Claude Code doesn’t know my business, my clients or what I want to say. With a written plan it doesn’t have to guess, and when the plan changes, the site follows. When the core message changed from “From real problems to working software” to “Projects, shaped with you. Products, crafted by us.”, the change went through the home page, every other page, the footer and the content plan in one commit.
A theme, not a blank page
I didn’t start from an empty folder. I compared nine Astro themes against the content plan and the logo, and picked Foundrilo: black and white with one accent colour, light and dark mode, and sections for work, services, a journal and a contact form that map onto Projects, Cases, About and Contact.
Buying a theme was also a deliberate choice. AI can produce a decent-looking layout in minutes, but I wanted to support human creativity, so the foundation of this site is a template a designer crafted by hand, paid for with a licence. AI builds on that work rather than replacing it.
From there, the work was making it ours. The orange accent became the cyan of the eye in our logo. Two things the theme doesn’t have, product pages and a career timeline on the About page, were added in the theme’s own style, so the site stays one design system. The designer set the direction; AI is good at extending it consistently.
How a change gets made
Most changes go the same way. I describe what I want or what’s wrong, Claude Code reads the code involved, makes the change and checks it in a browser, and I look at the result before anything is committed. Each commit message explains why the change was made, not only what changed.
That loop is fast, but it isn’t careless. A few examples from the history:
- Spacing. The gap between the menu and the first line of text differed per page: about 134 pixels on most pages, 118 on journal posts, 207 on the 404 page. All pages now share one value. Measuring every page is tedious for a person and quick for an AI.
- A focus bug. On the Road to the World Cup concept, opening the settings sheet moved keyboard focus to its Close button while the sheet was still sliding in, so the browser scrolled the whole phone screen up. The fix is two small changes, but finding the cause meant understanding how focus, scrolling and a scaled phone mock-up interact.
- Facts. The World Cup concept tells the story of Curaçao’s qualifying campaign, with scores, scorers and squad. Before launch, every fact was checked against official sources. An AI writes convincing sentences whether they’re true or not, so checking them stays a human job.
Where AI made the biggest difference
The project cards on the home and Cases pages used to show initials. Now each one draws what the project does. The SMP Online card fills in a night booking on the park’s reservation form and prices it with day and night rates. The Artisan Docs card runs the command in a terminal, opens the generated reference page and turns the CI check green. The hero on the home page is a dotted 3D globe that hides our logo: move the eye to the right spot and the dots form the Code Instinct head.
None of this is essential for a company website, and that’s the point. Without AI I wouldn’t have spent the time on it. With AI, the cost of trying an idea dropped far enough that it was worth doing, and the time saved went into polish: theme-aware colours taken from the live booking form, a still frame for visitors who prefer reduced motion, and a hint on touch screens.
What stays with me
Some decisions don’t belong to a tool:
- What we say. The positioning, the tagline and the case studies are mine. AI can suggest wording, but it can’t know what we stand for.
- What ships. We focused strictly on what we have ready now and how to present it in the best way possible. That gives us a good start, with much more to come.
- What we promise. The site has no cookies and no analytics, and the privacy statement says so. Keeping that true is a choice, not something a tool will notice on its own.
The stack
For the curious:
- Astro with TypeScript and Tailwind, content in Markdown and MDX files. No CMS and no database.
- Three.js for the hero scene, loaded on the home page only.
- Hosted as static files on Cloudflare Workers.
- The contact form sends through Web3Forms, so there’s no server of our own to maintain.
What’s next
A Dutch version of the site is next, followed by our products once they’re ready to show. Both will go the same way as everything above: plan first, small changes, and a person deciding what ships.