Two weeks ago around 3am I couldn’t sleep so I was browsing twitter (bad habit). I ran into this tweet.
In fact I have a soft spot in my heart for bettermotherfuckingwebsite. I used its spartan, bare bones wisdom as the starting point for my original site a few years ago. So I groggily thought, I should reply with a page for HTMX (the JavaScript library for HTML-oriented web development). So I bought a domain and went back to sleep.
The next morning I woke up, remembered what I had done, and vibed out a website. I used Claude for a variety of tasks:
- Reviewed existing sites to characterize this de facto genre
- Draft copy for the new site, and reorganize copy based on my edits and additions
- Generate page HTML and JavaScript for an embedded HTMX demo
- Lightly research new HTMX4 developments
- Deploy it, and debug DNS and HTTPS issues with GitHub
This allowed me to reply to the original tweet with a website as a punchline. Behold!
Okay, it’s not Mark Twain. But this took less than two hours!
To frequent model users, it may not be news that you can use just one tool (Claude Code in this case, but I could have used SolveIt) to do so many different kinds of work so quickly.
But I still thought it was neat, so I recorded a dev chat with my colleauge Erik about it. Later it briefly ended up on the front page of hacker news. If you’re curious about the workflow for this sort of thing, I used Simon Willison’s new Claude export tool to export the chat transcripts warts-and-all, and the site is open source.
In fact, in the transcripts, you can even see my cringeworthy attempts to figure out how I should retweet it, and to fret over the merit of criticism there that I was wasting people’s time by pushing AI slop into the world.
I do a feel a little bad about that. But hey, I didn’t post it on Hacker News! I just replied to a tweet, and started a conversation. And now I have atoned for my sins, by writing every goddamn word of this blog post by hand, like a cave man, or like William Shakespeare.