I Built My Portfolio in One Sitting With Claude. Here's What I Learned.
We are living through the most consequential shift in how software gets built since the internet itself. Agentic AI is not a spectator sport. You cannot watch from the sidelines, read about it, and expect to keep up. You have to be on the field. You have to build. The gap between people who are using these tools daily and people who are "planning to learn" is widening fast, and it is not going to close.
That conviction is what drives everything I work on. I am a father of three and build tools at the intersection of technology, classical wisdom, and human flourishing. My two live projects are Bedtime Virtues, an AI story generator rooted in the cardinal virtues, and The Rudyard Library, a 3D atlas of a creator's intellectual universe. I needed a landing page that communicated all of that without a framework, a build step, or a real budget.
So I sat down one evening and built the whole thing with Claude.
Vibing with Claude Code
I didn't write a spec. I described what I wanted in plain language, sometimes with screenshots, sometimes just vibes. Claude generated the code. But "generated" undersells it. This was iterative, opinionated collaboration.
I wanted depth and immersion. A space theme with slowly drifting stars that respond to your cursor, parallax that pulls you into the page. Claude built a canvas star field that tracks mouse movement and layered it behind a subtle grid overlay. Then I pushed for the project cards to feel physical. Claude added 3D perspective tilt that follows your cursor with a metallic sheen that catches the light as you move across the surface. Small details, but the kind that make a page feel alive instead of flat.
The two project cards needed their titles on the exact same horizontal line, but one had a two-line quote above it and the other had three. I said "the lines aren't perfectly aligned." Claude measured the DOM with getBoundingClientRect() and calculated the offset. First try: 28px. Close. Second: 52px. Overshot. Third: 24px. Nailed it. No guessing. Just measure, adjust, repeat.
The family photo had more whitespace above it than below. I sent a screenshot. Claude adjusted margins: 40px, then 0, then -16px, then -24px. Each time I looked and said "still off" or "that's it." Four rounds of "how about now?" until it felt balanced. The tool did the math. I did the feeling.
After deploying to GitHub Pages, HTTPS wasn't working. GitHub kept serving a wildcard cert instead of one for jontidd.com. Claude tried the obvious fixes. Nothing. Then it deleted and recreated the Pages configuration via the GitHub API, which forced a fresh cert from Let's Encrypt. I would not have known to try that.
Taste still matters
AI can generate a 3D tilt effect with metallic sheen in seconds. It can wire up a canvas star field with parallax. What it cannot do is feel the difference between "technically correct" and "actually good."
I pushed back on spacing. I said "the photo has more whitespace above than below, fix that." I rejected a sparkle-removal attempt that left a green blob. The tool accelerated my execution by 10x, but the aesthetic judgment was still mine.
This is the part people miss in the "AI will replace developers" discourse. The code is the easy part. The hard part is knowing what to build, why it matters, and whether it feels right. AI is a force multiplier for taste, not a replacement for it.
What I shipped
A single index.html file. No dependencies, no build step, no framework. It includes:
- An animated star field with mouse parallax that gives the page a sense of depth
- 3D perspective-tilt project cards with cursor-following metallic sheen
- A live typing demo that recreates the Bedtime Virtues experience
- A Midjourney-created representation of Rudyard in the cosmic library I imagine as the embodiment of all the digital knowledge I have curated
- A collapsible contact form via FormSubmit.co
- Scroll-reveal animations via IntersectionObserver
- An Aristotle quote about eudaimonia, because if you are building tools for human flourishing, you should probably cite the person who coined the term
Custom-coded. The landing page is hosted on GitHub Pages, the apps themselves on Vercel. Total recurring cost: a $14/year domain.
The point
The best way to learn is to build. The best way to understand what AI can do is to sit with it and make something real. Not a tutorial. Not a toy. Something you care about, something with your name on it.
This era of agentic assistance will reward the people who show up and do the work. The tools are here. The excuses are gone.
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