My freelance website has been in the making for years.
And yes, before anyone says it, those years pre-date AI.
This wasn’t one of those “I had an idea on Friday and launched a business by Monday” stories. This was the more traditional route: endless tweaks, abandoned drafts, changing my mind every few months, and periodically deciding that the whole thing needed a complete redesign.
You know, normal website behaviour.
As a writer, I’d always focused on the words. The design, layout and technical side of things felt like a separate universe reserved for people who used phrases like “frontend issues” and somehow knew what they meant.
Then everyone started talking about Claude.
At first, I used it for exactly what you’d expect a freelance writer to use it for: brainstorming ideas, refining copy, and helping me untangle the occasional sentence that had become far too clever for its own good.
But eventually curiosity got the better of me.
What could possibly go wrong?
People kept mentioning Claude’s Chrome extension and how it could actually interact with websites. As someone whose website had been lingering on my to-do list for longer than I’d like to admit, I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about.
To my surprise, it was genuinely useful.
Claude quickly identified a few issues I’d either missed or been ignoring. It helped fix image display problems, sorted out some broken links, and pointed out strengths and weaknesses in the overall user experience. It was a bit like getting free feedback from a designer, developer and slightly opinionated creative director all at once.
Naturally, this gave me confidence.
Once the obvious fixes were done, I started making requests.
Small requests.
Reasonable requests.
Could this section have a little more space around it?
Could those boxes be aligned slightly differently?
Could that button sit a little higher?
Could the overall page feel a bit more polished?
The kind of feedback every creative person gives despite having absolutely no idea how difficult it might be to implement.
At first, Claude handled everything beautifully.
Then came the day that nearly ended us.
The day my website briefly ceased to exist
I don’t even remember what I asked for. It was something completely harmless. The digital equivalent of asking someone to straighten a picture frame.
Claude got to work.
A few moments later, parts of my website had vanished.
Entire sections of content seemed to have disappeared into the vast wilderness of the internet. Images were missing. Layouts were broken. Things that had worked perfectly five minutes earlier were suddenly behaving as though they’d never met each other before.
Meanwhile, Claude remained remarkably calm.
I, on the other hand, was conducting a full-scale panic.
As far as I was concerned, years of work had just been launched into space because I’d asked for slightly different spacing.
The funniest part was how technical I suddenly became.
Within minutes, I was discussing layouts, containers, responsiveness and visual hierarchy as though I had any business using those words in a sentence.
I didn’t know what half of them meant.
I was simply repeating whatever Claude had told me in the previous chat and hoping it sounded convincing.
Eventually, after a series of increasingly desperate conversations, Claude managed to undo the damage, restore what had disappeared, and make the changes I’d originally wanted.
And that’s when I realised something interesting
Claude hadn’t turned me into a developer.
I still can’t code.
I couldn’t build a website from scratch and I certainly couldn’t explain the technical wizardry happening behind the scenes.
What it had done was remove the barrier between having an idea and attempting to implement it.
For years, every technical adjustment felt like something that required specialist knowledge. Now, I could simply explain what I wanted in plain English and let Claude translate my vague creative complaints into something actionable.
“The spacing feels off.”
“The boxes look strange.”
“Can we make it feel more premium?”
Somehow, that was enough.
So no, Claude didn’t make me a developer.
But it did make me the kind of person who has very strong opinions about padding, spacing and button placement.
And honestly, that feels close enough.
