Claude Code is my IDE now

I rebuilt this entire portfolio by talking to an AI. Not 'with help from.' Inside it. Every file, every deploy, every decision passes through a conversation. The AI proposes, I approve or push back, and the code writes itself as a side effect of the decisions I make. That sounds either obvious or insane depending on how much you've used these tools.

Two things. First, code stopped being the thing I was paid to produce. It became a side effect of decisions I was paid to make. I think about what to build and why. The AI handles the keystrokes.

Second, the loop got shorter. Going from an idea to a working page used to take a sprint. Now it takes an afternoon. The catch: the AI will happily ship something subtly wrong if you let it. Every change goes through the same gate I'd give a junior team member. What did you actually change? Show me. Prove the live page is serving it correctly.

Install Claude Code and run it in any project folder. It reads your project as context. Start a task with a short description of what you want, let it propose a plan, approve or push back, and watch each step as it runs. Course-correct the moment something goes wrong (cheaper than fixing it three steps later).

Set up a rules file (CLAUDE.md) at the root of your project with your conventions and constraints. This way, every session starts with your preferences already loaded instead of explaining them fresh each time.

Anything where the thinking is the hard part and the typing is the boring part. New features, design changes, documentation rewrites, deploy safety improvements. I still drop to a regular editor for tiny one-line changes where typing is faster than describing.

Code stopped being the artifact. It became a side effect of decisions.