Meta ·2026
How I built this site
This site is the artifact; the point is how it got made. What I learned designing and building it with AI, and where my judgement did the work the tools could not.
- AI-assisted build
- Design judgement
- Claude Code
- Figma
- Google Stitch
I designed and built santbar.com in the open, with Claude Code as a working partner rather than an autocomplete. I direct it, correct it, and hold it to a standard. The process is a loop: I set the intent, it drafts, I react, and we converge. It compresses the distance from an idea to something real I can judge, and that judgement is the part that stays mine.
The skill that mattered was not prompting, it was knowing what good looks like and refusing what did not meet it. I set the design system, the voice, and the bar for every screen, then used AI to move fast between those decisions: exploring more directions than I could alone, drafting components, and synthesizing messy input into something I could shape. Figma and Google Stitch sat alongside Claude Code for the visual and system work.
The learning I keep is where AI genuinely lifts product work and where it cannot be trusted. It is fast and generative, and it will also please you, cut corners, and sound confident while wrong. So I keep a human in the loop on the things that carry risk: taste, accessibility, and truth. Under the hood the site stays deliberately boring, a static Astro build with a single source-of-truth data model that emits its own machine-readable layer, so people and AI agents read the same content.