Chris Parker

I’ve had it in the back of my mind for a while to redo my website, so here it is.

I experimented a year or so ago with ChatGPT and some of the other LLMs and they did the basics well but once I started really pushing things the wheels came off pretty quickly.

Recently I’ve been playing with Claude and Claude Code from Anthropic and things have gotten a lot better. I’ve written a couple of macOS and iOS applications purely by prompting and as they got more complicated the models handled the complexity with relative ease.

I decided I’d dust off the website and see how far I could get with hugo and some Claude Code prompting. First thing I wanted to experiment with was a theme, so I had CC create a local web page with 4 or 5 different color schemes, buttons to switch between them, and some sliders to mess with parameters.

Once I had a color scheme dialed in, I created a new hugo scaffolding and asked CC to create a hugo theme based on the color scheme I chose. After that, I kept prompting the system for style changes to evolve how the site looked. With hugo server -D running and Safari pointed at the localhost web server, I had a live update running which showed me all the prompted changes in real time.

I was able to experiment with moving things around, different styles of navigation, different pinning strategies, etc., all just by asking CC to do things.

For people who have really been quick to use these tools none of this is going to be much of a surprise. It’s amazing how much better the models have become since the beginning of 2025. The things that excite me about this are:

• The ability to experiment pretty fearlessly: between source control and telling CC to “undo that change”, the penalty for getting something wrong or wanting something different is much less than if I were doing all of this by hand.
• Being able to ask the system what it’s doing: the fact that I can ask it to do things and I can ask it about the structure of the site in order to refine what I want or understand why it’s doing something is extremely enabling. I can learn from it.

There’s no question the technology will be a game-changer for people who know how to use the tools effectively. These things really shrink the activation cost of learning new systems and getting boilerplate or repetitive work done. I’m looking forward to working on real code again for the first time in years and that’s exciting.