I set this website up back in the spring, and then, like a lot of side projects, it sat there. Half-finished pages, placeholder text from a template, a homepage that did not really say what EricsTechDesk is about. When I finally sat down to pick it back up, I tried something different: I rebuilt it with Claude Code, an AI coding agent from Anthropic.
This is not a sponsored post and it is not a tutorial. It is just what the experience was like for someone who works in tech all day and still did not want to spend a month of evenings fighting a page builder.
What I asked for
I started with something pretty vague: help me revamp my website and pick it back up again. Before touching anything, it read through my own planning documents, looked at the live site and went through the WordPress dashboard to see what was actually there. Then it came back with a short list of what was broken and a few questions for me.
Those questions were the important part. Which visual direction did I want? Should changes go live as it worked, or be built as drafts first? What should happen to the leftover demo content? I made those calls, and it took it from there.
What it handled
Over a few sessions, the agent did most of the heavy lifting:
- A full redesign around my logo colors, with a new homepage, About, Gear and Contact pages
- Clearing out the template filler that had been sitting on the site since day one
- Running WordPress and plugin updates, then checking that nothing broke
- Tidying up duplicate plugins and fixing the page title and description that show up in search
- Hooking the newsletter signup up to my email service and testing the contact form end to end
- Writing a plain-language privacy policy and affiliate disclosure
After almost every change it went back and looked at the result, on desktop and on a phone-sized screen, and told me what it found. Including the things it got wrong the first time, which I appreciated more than I expected.
What it did not do
This part matters. It never typed a password, created an account for me or made a change that could not be undone without asking first. When something needed a login, an API key or a change to my domain settings, it stopped and walked me through doing it myself. When it was not sure what I wanted, it asked instead of guessing.
So it did not feel like handing my site over to a robot. It felt more like working with a very fast assistant who does the tedious parts and keeps checking in on the decisions that are actually mine to make.
What I took away from it
As a database administrator, I am used to being careful with anything that touches production. What surprised me was how much of that caution was built into the process: look first, explain the plan, make the change, verify it, report back honestly.
It is not magic, and you still need to know what you want. But for a solo creator with limited evenings, it turned a project I kept putting off into something I finished in a handful of sessions.
Curious about the process?
I kept this one high level on purpose. If you want to know more about how it worked, what I would do differently, or whether something like this could help with your own site, send me an email at contact@ericstechdesk.com. I read everything.
And if you want the weekly roundup of the most interesting tech I come across, the Monday desk note signup is on the homepage.