Pairing with Claude Code to rebuild my startup's website

Summary

As mentioned in my most recent post, I’ve been experimenting with AI coding agents and MCP servers to rebuild CodeYam’s website. Version one is already live, with another iteration landing imminently (likely by the time you read this). As a non-engineer founder, I wanted to see if I could ship our new designs without hiring extra developers or spending months learning to code from scratch.I’ve heard OpenAI’s Codex has improved since I last tried it a few weeks ago, but for this project I stuck with this current stack.Ironically, Anthropic recently published a postmortem of three recent issues that degraded response quality from Claude, widely discussed on Hacker News.While I don't know if I hit these specific bugs, Claude's response quality varied wildly, and sometimes even hour to hour. I wasted several hours on occasions where Claude would make changes to completely unrelated parts of the application instead of addressing my actual request.That said, despite the challenges, this was a pretty incredible experience. The fact that I, as a non-engineer, could take the new website designs (in Figma) and implement them with high fidelity as changes to our actual codebase by pairing with Claude is amazing.This took weeks, not the months or years it might have if I learned how to code (and properly use Remix, in this case). While maybe I could have built a site equally quickly using a low or no-code website builder like Squarespace, Bubble, or Wordpress, it would have been using pre-made components that wouldn’t have made it possible to match our designs perfectly.Initially, I did all my work locally. Meaning if anything had happened to my laptop, all my work would have been lost. In hindsight, a terrible idea.In searching for the best way to work with Claude, I landed on a workflow quite similar to how many developers work today.I’d start working on specific changes locally, often checking them on a development server (typically all on my laptop, although I recently lear...