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How this site was built

This site was built in a single session with Claude Code. The entire process — from empty repo to deployed site — took about five minutes of human time. My contribution was one prompt and a few follow-up requests.

The Prompt

This is roughly what I gave Claude Code to start:

Make my personal site snazzy and resume-worthy.

Identity: "Jordan Rubin — Researcher / Operator"
Design: dark academic theme, Computer Modern (the LaTeX font),
animated gradient background, no JS required.

Include:
- Hero with name + title
- Social links: GitHub, Substack, LinkedIn, Future Tokenizer, OpenReview
- Recent Substack posts (fetched at build time)
- Full OG meta tags for social sharing

Archive the old Three.js experiment, clean up dead boilerplate.

What Claude Code Did

  • 1. Explored the existing repo, identified dead code and stale dependencies
  • 2. Archived the Three.js experiment, deleted Vercel/Next.js boilerplate SVGs
  • 3. Downloaded and self-hosted Computer Modern web fonts (WOFF2, ~400KB)
  • 4. Built a design system: custom Tailwind palette, CSS animated gradient, hover effects
  • 5. Created the layout shell with full Open Graph + Twitter Card meta tags
  • 6. Built the landing page with hero, social icon links (inline SVGs), and writing section
  • 7. Fetched my full Substack post history via their archive API
  • 8. Generated an OG image with Pillow (because ImageMagick wasn't installed)
  • 9. Created the About page by pulling my bio from Substack
  • 10. Committed, synced, and deployed to Netlify

The Stack

Framework
Astro 5.6 (static output)
Styling
Tailwind CSS 3.4
Typography
Computer Modern Serif (self-hosted WOFF2)
Animation
CSS only — zero JavaScript
Hosting
Netlify (static deploy)
Posts
Substack archive API, fetched at build time
Built with
Claude Code (Claude Opus 4.6)

I'm mostly just experimenting with what's possible when you let an LLM drive the front-end. This whole thing — layout, components, styles, API integration — came out of a single conversation. I wrote the prompt; Claude Code wrote the site. Still tinkering. Thanks for taking a look.