Designing and Building with Claude Code
How AI is changing the way I work as a designer.
For twenty years, I've been a designer who occasionally codes. I could build basic things with HTML/CSS and a bit of hacked together JS, but it was slow, and frustrating. The terminal scared me, which was strange, cause I grew up using DOS.
Even though I persevered with learning to improve my coding skills, I always felt as though my proper place was in a design tool, like Photoshop, then Sketch, then Figma. I never really crossed the chasm until now. Cursor, then Claude Code has become a gateway for me into the world of development. 12 months ago it would have been inconceivable that I would be spinning up test branches, pushing PRs, running builds. All that fundamental knowledge I picked up along the way, understanding just enough about which languages, frameworks and libraries to use, is now worth its weight in gold.
Claude Code collapsed the gap between what I could envision and what I could actually ship. This is a dream come true. I rebuilt this portfolio site in a couple of days. Side projects I'd been sitting on for years came to life in afternoons. The feedback loop that used to take days now takes minutes.
I'm not designing less. If anything, I'm designing more. I describe what I want, see it built, adjust, iterate. The craft is still there, the tools have just changed.
