Building a website with Claude over a weekend
February 15, 2026·2 min read
API cost is the equivalent if billed per token. Actual cost is a flat subscription.
This website went from npm create astro to deployed over a weekend. Dark theme, content collections, app detail pages, responsive layout, a design I don’t hate. I’m a backend developer. Frontend is not my day job. About 3 hours of actual involvement, and I never touched the code.
Step one: run Claude Code with --dangerously-skip-permissions. That flag name isn’t a joke, but without it you’re clicking “allow” on every file write, every shell command, every dev server restart. The flow dies. With permissions skipped, I described what I wanted, checked the browser, pointed out what sucked, and Claude fixed it. That’s the entire job.
My first prompt was “make the homepage look better.” I got something that looked better in the way a stock photo looks professional. By Saturday night I was writing “featured app section, big card, glowing border on hover, icon left, description right, cyan links.” That shipped almost directly. The skill isn’t coding anymore. It’s knowing what you want and saying it precisely enough.
A weekend, a website I actually like and update, and a lesson I keep relearning: front-load the context. Write a voice guide, set up a test suite, define the design constraints before you start prompting. That 5% of effort up front makes the other 95% feel like cheating.