Series: Weekend at Claude's — misadventures in building a production app with an AI anyone could mistake for the person who's going to make the whole thing happen
There's a moment in every project where you open your code editor, stare at a blank file, and realize you have absolutely no idea where to start. I've learned to handle that moment differently now: I don't open the code editor. I open Claude AI.
Here's a concrete example. I needed to add a blog section to Aphilaty's marketing site. Simple enough in theory. In practice it meant making decisions about content strategy, page structure, navigation changes to existing HTML, wireframes for new pages, and a detailed enough brief that Claude Code could actually build it without me supervising every line.
I could have opened Claude Code and figured it out as I went. I've done that. It works, sort of, the way improvising a road trip works — you get somewhere, but probably not where you meant to go.
Instead I stayed in Claude AI and knocked out four deliverables in sequence:
1. Blog content plan — what to write, how to organize it, what the editorial angle should be 2. index.html changes — the specific code updates to add the blog section to the existing marketing page 3. Page wireframes — structure for the blog index and individual post template 4. Claude Code primer — a written brief describing exactly what to build, what files to touch, and what to watch out for
By the time I opened Claude Code, all the thinking was done. Claude Code got a well-scoped task with full context. The build session was fast. Nothing caught fire.
The pattern: use Claude AI for decisions. Use Claude Code for execution. They're complementary tools, and treating them that way is one of the highest-leverage things I've found in this workflow.
Bernie would have just walked into the meeting and winged it. We planned ahead. Remarkably, it worked.
Aphilaty is a privacy-first community coordination app. aphilaty.com