Rebuilding My Personal Website with Claude Code
My old personal website had a problem I'd been ignoring for too long. It was built directly in Notion, which made it easy to update, but the routing through a Cloudflare worker was broken — visitors typing mattniemitz.com would get forwarded to a long Notion URL instead of a clean experience. And beyond the technical issues, the design just felt stale.
I wanted something more alive. A friend had built an interactive resume using Claude Code that let visitors ask it questions about him, and I loved the idea. So I decided to rebuild from scratch and use it as a real test of what Claude Code could do.
The brief I started with
I gave Claude Code a detailed prompt describing what I was after: a dual-mode experience with a traditional scroll view on one side and an AI-powered Q&A on the other, where visitors could just ask my site questions about me and get real answers back. I wanted to keep Notion as my content management system — I'd been updating my site from Notion for years and didn't want to give that up — but I wanted a completely different front-end experience.
I fed it my Notion content export, pointed it at my LinkedIn profile and my consulting business site, and asked it to analyze everything, propose some design directions, and then build based on my feedback.
How it actually went
The process was genuinely iterative. Claude Code proposed design directions before writing a line of code, which let me give feedback on the concept before getting into the weeds. Once I picked a direction, it scaffolded the full project, and from there we worked through the build the way you'd work with a developer: I'd describe what I wanted to change, it would implement it, I'd review and react.
The things that would have taken me the longest — wiring up the Notion API so content updates flow through automatically, setting up the AI Q&A layer, configuring the GitHub-to-Vercel deployment pipeline — Claude Code handled without much friction. What took the most time was the iterative design work: getting the layout, typography, and feel right through a lot of back-and-forth.
The stack
- Next.js for the frontend
- Notion as the CMS — I can still update content without touching code
- GitHub for version control
- Vercel for hosting (free tier, custom domain routing finally working correctly)
What I took away from it
I'm a product person, not a developer. I can read code and I understand how systems fit together, but I've never built and shipped a production web app on my own before. Claude Code changed that. It's not that it wrote perfect code every time — it didn't — but it kept the project moving, explained what it was doing, and made the debugging process collaborative rather than frustrating.
The site still isn't finished — I have a list of things I want to keep improving — but it's live, it works, and it's genuinely mine in a way the old Notion page never was.
You can see it at mattniemitz.com.