I had a domain — simplbase.com. I had an empty Next.js directory. And I had a very specific problem: I hate designing things from scratch.
So I did what any reasonable blockchain developer would do in 2025 — I handed the design brief to an AI and watched what happened.
Here's the real, unfiltered account of building this site using Claude Sonnet 4.6.
The Starting Point
The brief was simple:
- Landing page with a centered text: "Glad you are here to know about me."
- The word "me." should animate like a typing cursor
- Clicking it downloads my resume
- Blog sections for tech, learning, and personal posts
- Fully responsive. No excuses.
What I did not say was: "make it look like a LinkedIn printout."
What I got on the first try was a dark mode with floating gradient blobs. Honestly, fine. But not me.
The Design Back-and-Forth
I just said "nope I don't like it."
Which is a completely useless design brief — and yet somehow it worked. Claude came back with three distinct aesthetic directions: Apple Minimalist, Modern Brutalist, and Terminal/Developer. I didn't pick any of them. Instead, I dropped a Dribbble link.
Momen's Portfolio — a neo-brutalist design. White background, stark black typography, vibrant yellow accents, floating sparkle symbols.
Within minutes: Space Mono font. #ffb800 yellow. White background. Thick yellow typing cursor on "me." Floating ✦ symbols slowly drifting around the screen. That was the moment the direction locked in.
Then I said: "too big."
That's it. Two words. And the clamp() values in the CSS adjusted — the headline went from a 5rem max down to 3rem. That exchange felt oddly powerful. Like having a junior dev who actually listens on the first try.
The Personality Problem
After the design was locked in, I looked at the portfolio and felt... nothing. It was technically correct. Every section was there. But it read like I had copy-pasted my resume into an HTML file.
Which is, embarrassingly, exactly what had happened.
Claude's diagnosis was sharp:
- The copy was corporate-speak — "Senior Full Stack Blockchain Developer with 4+ years of experience"
- The structure was predictable — Hero → About → Skills → Experience → Contact. Every portfolio ever.
- Nothing surprising happened when you scrolled
The proposed fixes were exactly right:
- Rewrite the voice — "I build things that run on blockchains. Sometimes they don't get hacked."
- Add a "Now" band — A pulsing green dot with real-time context: what I'm building, learning, and where I am
- Replace the skill grid with a marquee — Three rows of tech tags scrolling at different speeds in different directions
That marquee was the one that made me go: oh, that's actually cool.
What Worked
- Speed. From empty directory to a working, styled landing page — under 10 minutes.
- Iteration feels natural. "Too big." → fixed. "The arrow overlaps the text." → one CSS property changed. No three-message back-and-forth trying to explain what I mean.
- It waited for my input. When it came time to write the About section, it asked for my information. It didn't hallucinate a bio. That restraint mattered.
- It reads context. After I dropped the Dribbble reference, it immediately understood the aesthetic — the font choice, the color palette, the border weight. I didn't have to spell it out.
What Was Actually Hard
It wasn't magic. Here's what I had to do:
- Reject the first design (dark-mode blob aesthetic — too generic)
- Tell it the copy felt like a resume pasted into HTML — it couldn't feel that on its own
- Drop the Dribbble reference to actually get the visual direction right — the AI doesn't have taste, it mirrors yours
- Notice the small bugs — "me." floating above the baseline, the bullet arrow overlapping text — it needed eyes on the actual output
The AI doesn't know what you want until you show it. But once you do, the execution is fast and it doesn't forget.
The Meta Part
This blog post? Also written with Claude. I described what happened, gave it the conversation context, and it drafted the structure and copy. I rewrote the parts that felt too polished or not quite me.
That's probably the honest model going forward: the AI does the structure and execution, I do the taste and judgment.
Is This the Future for Solo Devs?
For shipping fast? Absolutely yes.
For building something with soul? That's still on you.
The domain is simplbase.com. The stack is Next.js + Vanilla CSS + Space Mono. The AI helped build it. But the decisions — the Dribbble reference, the "too big" correction, the insistence on personality over professionalism — those were mine.
And maybe that's the point. The tools got better. Your judgment matters more, not less.
Built with Next.js, caffeine, and Claude Sonnet 4.6. You're reading it on the site it helped build.