ESSAY · AI · AUTOMATION · SOFTWARE
Building This Site with Claude Design and a CMS
How this site went from a design brief inspired by gwern.net to a deployed, content-managed site — and why the interesting part is what happens after launch, not before.
This site was designed in Claude Design from a written brief, then rebuilt as a real application: Next.js for the pages, TinaCMS for the editing layer, files in a git repository as the only database.
The design step
The brief asked for gwern.net's philosophy without its machinery: monochrome, dense, text-forward, metadata everywhere — but no recursive popups, no backlinks engine, no custom static-site compiler. The design tool produced a token system (seven colors per theme, six type sizes, an eight-step spacing scale) and six page templates, which were then translated one-to-one into components.
The editing layer
The part that matters long-term is that content changes never require a code session. Essays, portfolio entries, and even design tokens (accent color, reading measure, dropcaps on or off) are all editable from the admin panel, and every save is a git commit that redeploys the site automatically.
The stack, honestly
- Next.js App Router, statically rendered, no client framework beyond the theme toggle and one modal.
- TinaCMS for visual editing against MDX files.
- Vercel for hosting, Cloudflare for DNS.
- Total recurring cost: zero dollars a month.