This Website

Or: How I Learned to Learn with Claude

I was inspired to make this after a friend shared how they rebuilt their own personal website with Claude in about 2 hours. It took me probably 5x that, which is an embarrasingly long time. But then, my first prompt was basically "How do I register a domain?"

I've learned enough "coding" over the years to understand the basics of Assembly, C, HTML, Python, OOP, etc. But building a functioning app has always felt like an entirely different league of understanding. It's like the difference between learning "the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell", and knowing how to synthesize a protein from a DNA sequence.

Today, I can say "I registered the domain through Cloudflare, built the site in HTML using Claude and VS Code, pushed to my GitHub repo, and deployed it through Vercel." My PM friends might laugh at the simplicity, but for someone with literally no experience, it took hours of learning every one of those words from scratch (did y'all take classes on this stuff or what??)

What's the difference between registering a domain and hosting a website?
Explain everything I need to know about GitHub. What's the difference between pull, push, commit, deploy, fork, branch, merge, clone, and ???
Wait, before all that, help me install Git and set it up. Also, the terminal is scary.
What the hell is a Vercel...

Look at me now, with my very own HTML page on the internet. Somehow I missed both the Myspace generation and the Wordpress era, but I'm just in time for the AI bubble.

I think there's some interesting insights here about the future of learning with AI. I didn't have to pay for a class, follow some online tutorial, or pull up 20 tabs to troubleshoot every time I got stuck. This was an entirely personalized, self-directed learning process. I started with what I wanted to do, and with no idea how to do it or what "it" even was. Claude helped me figure it out, one step at a time.

Along the way, I could also follow whatever rabbit holes caught my interest. "Did people really used to code HTML by hand in the before times? What are the best practices for creating local directories? Seriously, what the hell is a Vercel?". It felt like a much more natural, curiosity-driven way to learn and to deepen my understanding when and where it was needed.

So what's next? By now, I feel like I can start letting AI take the wheel and start making bigger jumps for me, but also understand enough to make quick tweaks and minor fixes when needed. I have a few more ideas, with no clue how to get there, so I guess we'll see where we end up along the way.

Stick around, maybe you'll learning something too.

P.S. I wrote all the text on this page myself, without AI, <p></p> tags and all.

P.P.S. Except the formatting on this footer, I guess... shout out to the homie Claude