Personal websites have a funny way of freezing in time. You build one during a certain chapter of your life, and it quietly keeps speaking that chapter's language long after you've moved on.
Mine... well, it was stuck in minimal web3. I built this in October 2025, when I was still active in the crypto space, and everything about it carried the accent. The tone, the copy, the design. Even the menus were all lowercase, because in web3 pretty much everyone wrote everything in lowercase.
Then there was the look. Very minimal, very clean, very developer. But every time I opened it, I had the same thought: this feels like a dev's website. And I'm not a dev. I'm a marketer, and my site was supposed to say that.
Patching a place I didn't own
So I started small. A few tweaks here, some new copy there.
The old site was built on Lovable, a tool that builds websites from prompts and also hosts them and stores your content. That's great when you're starting out. It got awkward once I started making my changes with Claude.
Every change turned into a little round trip. Claude made the change, I checked a preview, then I opened Lovable and clicked Publish to make it live. Anything touching the content itself, like my bio or my projects, had to be edited inside Lovable.
It sort of felt like renovating a rented flat. You can repaint the walls, but you keep having to call the landlord. So I stopped patching and rebuilt the whole thing from zero.
Building a website is a conversation now
With Claude Code running Opus 5.5, rebuilding a full website is something a non-developer can do in an evening. Mine went from a written plan at 10:52pm to live on mendes.cc by lunchtime the next day.
For comparison, I remember building my first personal website back in 2018. I used WordPress with Elementor, a drag and drop builder that sits on top of it. It took me weeks. It was buggy, and it was slow, because Elementor made every page heavy. I kept running Google's PageSpeed tests, fixing whatever I could, watching tutorial after tutorial, and running it again. The only code I wrote was pasting in a few scripts for analytics, and maybe tweaking one or two things. That was it.
Weeks of fighting a page builder back then, one evening of conversation now. The difference is pretty much bonkers.
With AI, you describe what you want, Claude shows you options, and you react. "This feels too techy." "Make the contact page sound more like me." "Add a dark mode." It builds, you look, you push back, it adjusts.
If you're afraid to lose control of what you can or cannot do, a simple pro-tip is to ask Claude to build the tools for manual editing. For example, I used Claude to build a CMS and a blog editor. This way, I can make simple tweaks and have full control over the content, without spending any tokens. As a matter of fact, this article was written partially by Claude, imported to the website by Claude, but edited by myself in the CMS we built. It took about 2 hours to get this done. Crazy world we live in.
All of this means the skills that matter are the ones marketers already have. Knowing what you want to say. Knowing who it's for. Having taste and being able to explain why something feels off. If you can brief a designer, you can do this.
Why Claude and Vercel instead of Lovable
My first try with Lovable, about two years ago, was rough. I wanted to make something fun, and what came out felt like a landing page assembled from the same building blocks as everyone else's. Every Lovable project back then pretty much looked the same.
To be fair, the vibecoding app is much better now, with a lot more integrations and options, and it's how I got this site up in the first place. It's a good place to start, and it can feel more intuitive than Claude. It's still not as good as building with Claude and Opus 5.5, though, and it's much, much more expensive.
The bigger trouble starts when you want to keep growing it. Your site, your content and your hosting all live inside one tool, so every change goes through that tool.
With Claude building the site and Vercel hosting it, everything sits in accounts you own: the code, the database, the images and the domain. Changes go live when you save them. Claude can edit your content directly, so "add this project to my site" becomes one message instead of a trip through yet another dashboard. And for a personal site, Vercel's free plan is enough.
If your site or app is still on Lovable and you've felt that friction, give this a try.
How to do it yourself
You don't need my exact setup, but these are the steps that made it feel safe.
Back up everything first. Ask Claude to save a copy of your current site's text and images before touching anything.
Ask for a plan before any building. Have Claude write down what the new site will look like and how your content moves over. Read it like a brief, and change it until it's right.
Build on a preview link. Vercel gives you a private test address, so you can compare old and new side by side while your real site stays untouched.
Test the editing, not just the pages. Add, change and delete something in your new site's admin before trusting it with real content. That's how we caught a bug where saving from an old browser tab overwrote newer changes.
Move the domain last, with an undo plan. Ask Claude for the exact one-step rollback before you switch, and keep the old site running for a couple of weeks as a safety net.
Where it stands now
The wow moment for me came later, with my Nocta project, but that one deserves its own article. This one felt quieter. More like a realization: if I'm going to keep rebuilding and changing things, I'm doing it with Claude, and I just have to keep going.