I've been using Squarespace to build and host my personal site for years. The WYSIWYG editor, the simplicity of managing content, the clean UI, and pre-built templates initially sold me on the platform.

But I was never happy with it—not truly.

As the platform grew and added features I didn’t need, its templates still didn’t match my vision. Combined with repeated Safari crashes and forced page reloads, that finally pushed me to switch.

Right around the time that "vibe coding" became a meme, I decided to try rebuilding my personal website. The stakes were low if things went wrong, and I wasn't planning on putting anything private or locked down on it. So I dove in.

On a Friday afternoon, I booted up VS Code and launched Claude Code in the terminal. After about three hours, I had a cleaned-up landing page, photo gallery support, and a simple content loader for long-form posts I wanted to share.

I was blown away.

Within another hour, I had the site in GitHub and deployed via Vercel. Using the hobby tier, this was also completely free.

In just four hours, I had saved myself $200 a year and was happier with the output than I ever was with the pre-built templates in Squarespace.

Things aren’t all rosy—the real bottleneck is still reading through and understanding the code, especially since this was my first time using Next.js or building anything for the web.

Claude definitely shortened the loop between idea and execution. I was new to React and Next.js, and it enabled me to spool up the project quickly and start reimplementing what I had with Squarespace.

But as someone who needs to understand how things work, there was still plenty of reading and researching needed to grasp what had been built and how it all fit together.

In short, here are my takeaways:

• I feel empowered by "agentic" coding tools to try building my own solutions from scratch rather than immediately reaching for a pre-built framework or app.
• Claude Code is powerful, but you need to be incredibly careful. Force yourself to slow down and understand what's happening and the choices it's making. Approve every change, every new addition, and understand before you commit.
• It's very easy to put on blinders and just let these tools take over your thinking and reasoning. Stay curious and do your own research to learn how these systems work in the "traditional" way. Continue exercising your reasoning and design muscles.

I'm excited to see how tools like Claude Code develop and improve over time, this is still very early days in this technology and I'm excited to see how it can help me succeed in implementing personal projects that I've only dreamed about before.