My portfolio site hadn’t been updated since early 2022. A blog had been an idea for longer than I can remember.

With the site, the question was always platform, build, look. My last one was Gatsby — hacked together from code I’d basically borrowed from a guy in Portugal[1] after messaging him cold and asking if he’d share it. He did. I got it working locally, deployed it to an S3 bucket for near to free, and felt pretty chuffed. Fast forward two years and I’d completely forgotten how any of it worked. Great stuff.

So I looked around. Framer looked exciting and was getting plenty of traction — Figma for websites, kind of. I paid for a subscription for two years and got nowhere. I had some ideas working, sort of. But I was constantly on forums.

Can I do this?
Is it possible to do that?
How do I get hover previews working on the homepage?
I’d like two sticky scrolling panes on article pages — anyone?

It was frustrating. I never got to a point I was happy with. I kept telling myself just put something out. But there was always that feeling: this isn’t what I want. This isn’t me. It’s a compromise.

The blog was the same story, different platform. I’d had the idea for years — I found a Figma file with references going back to 2022. The name, the typefaces, the colours, the layout. All there. I even set something up on Blogmaker at one point. Clunky, not totally wrong, but definitely not right. That feeling again: this isn’t what I want it to be.

Then in 2026 I watched a video by MDS showing Claude connected to Figma.[2] Something clicked. Within two weeks, working on and off, I had a new portfolio site. Not just a portfolio site — the portfolio site. The one I’d had in my head. Hover previews on the homepage. A little widget to change the background. A hidden drum machine Easter egg. A visual archive with a shuffle button. Sticky text panel on case study pages as you scroll through images.

Simple things. But things that had been beyond me trying to wrestle with a platform. As a friend said, it was like making my MySpace page again. This was actually fun. Being able to feed Claude my reference designs and talk to it — using something like Wispr Flow — was genuinely freeing. It let me express myself in building in a way I never had before.

A few weeks later, this blog. Two hours. Done. Live. Exactly how I wanted it.[3]

I had the vision the whole time. It wasn’t AI that gave me that. It was AI that finally got me there. Now I can pretty much go wherever I want.

  1. Eduardo Nunes is his name. He was incredibly gracious and gave me access to the site source code in GitHub. Please go and check out his current site, which is undersight.co. He also makes music under the name of Bore. Go check it out on Bandcamp. ↩︎

  2. The video was included in his newsletter and I watched it on the lightrail into work. I knew I had to try it out. What I loved about the video is it’s not polished, it’s not clean, and it really sort of just showed me how easy it can be to set up and then the backwards and forwards of working in this way. Though working between Claude and Figma has been a small amount of what I’ve done with AI so far, this was the opening of a new way of thinking. ↩︎

  3. why is this blog called “This Is Easy”? And why is this post called “This Is Easier”? I don’t think I can cover it here in the margins so I’ll get onto that at a later date and what that means to me. ↩︎