Back to Coding After 15 Years: How AI Became My Development Partner

I haven't written a line of code regularly for about 15 years. The last time I was actively developing websites, jQuery was cutting-edge, responsive design was a nice-to-have, and deploying meant FTPing files to a shared hosting server. Fast forward to 2025, and the landscape looks completely alien.

So when I decided to build a proper personal website last week, I had no idea what I was walking into. React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind, Vercel – these weren't just new tools, they were entire ecosystems I'd never encountered. But here's the thing: 48 hours later, I had a professional website that rivals anything we built at my agency. And I barely touched the code myself.

This isn't a story about learning to code again. It's about discovering an entirely new way to build – one where AI doesn't just assist, but genuinely partners with you to create something better than you could manage alone.

The 15-Year Gap

Let me be honest about where I started. Fifteen years ago, building a website meant writing HTML, CSS, and maybe, some JavaScript. You'd create a few files, upload them to a server, and you were done. It wasn't simple exactly, but it was comprehensible.

Modern web development? It's like walking into a Formula 1 garage when you last drove a Ford Escort. Everything is more powerful, more sophisticated, and frankly, more intimidating. The tooling alone requires a computer science degree to understand: build processes, dependency management, hot reloading, component trees. When did making a website become so complicated?

Don't get me wrong – these frameworks are incredible. Next.js can do things that would have required entire teams back in the day. But the learning curve is vertical, and when you're running a company, you don't have months to catch up on 15 years of evolution.

Finding My Starting Point

I knew I needed help, so I started where any sensible person does: looking for a template. After browsing through various options, I found this brilliant personal website template by a developer in Poland. I'm genuinely grateful to Bartosz Jarocki for putting his work out there – it gave me something solid to build from rather than staring at a blank screen wondering where to begin.

I forked it on GitHub and fired up Cursor to start making changes. This is where the reality of modern development hit me hard. Simple edits were taking forever. I'd change one thing and break three others. TypeScript was throwing errors I didn't understand. The build process would fail for reasons that seemed completely unrelated to what I'd actually changed.

After a frustrating few hours, I switched tactics and turned to Claude Chat. Instead of struggling alone, I started asking for help setting up my local development environment properly. Claude walked me through the setup step by step, explaining not just what to do but why each step mattered. Suddenly I had a working local server, hot reloading, and could see my changes instantly.

This was when I started copy-pasting code suggestions and actually making progress. But I was still very much in the driver's seat, trying to understand every change and manually implementing everything Claude suggested.

The Game Changer: Claude Code

Then, halfway through this process, Claude Code got released. I'd heard about it but hadn't tried it yet. The moment I did, everything changed.

This wasn't Claude Chat where I was copying and pasting suggestions. This was like having an actual developer sitting next to me – except this developer could see my entire codebase, understand the context of what we were building, and implement changes directly. But here's what really impressed me: when it made mistakes (and it did), it would catch them itself and fix them in real-time.

The workflow was completely different. Instead of me trying to code and getting stuck, I became more like a technical project manager. I'd explain what I wanted to achieve, and Claude Code would figure out how to implement it. Need a contact form with email integration? "Let's add that." Want to reorganise the image structure? "No problem, I'll handle the file moves and update all the references."

But it wasn't just doing the work – it was teaching me as we went. When I didn't understand a decision it made, I could ask why it chose a particular approach, and it would explain the reasoning. When I wanted to learn how something worked, it would break it down for me. It was simultaneously my developer and my coding tutor.

The Real Breakthrough: Building Something New

The moment I truly understood what this partnership could achieve was when I decided I wanted a contact page. This wasn't in the original template – it would be something entirely new that we'd build from scratch.

I explained what I wanted to Claude Code: a contact form that actually worked, not just a static page. It immediately suggested using a service called Resend for the email delivery, which I'd never heard of before. But instead of me having to research email services and figure out integration, Claude Code just got on with building it.

Watching it work was like having a senior developer on my team. It would write the form component, then realise we needed server-side handling, so it would create the API route. Then it would notice we needed proper error states, so it would add those. Each step built logically on the previous one, and the code was clean and well-structured.

When we tested it and the first email came through perfectly formatted, I had one of those "bloody hell, this actually works" moments. I'd had the idea, but Claude Code had turned it into reality with proper validation, error handling, and professional-grade implementation that I could never have tackled confidently on my own.

That's when the role shift really crystallised. I stopped thinking of myself as someone learning to code again and started thinking like a technical project manager working with an incredibly capable developer who happened to be AI.

The 48-Hour Transformation

From that contact page breakthrough, we just kept building. Looking back at what we accomplished in roughly 24 hours of actual work time (spread over a few days), I'm still slightly amazed.

Here's what we built together:

Day 1: The Foundation

• Completely rewrote all the content to reflect my background as CEO of ScreenCloud
• Built a new Work page from scratch showcasing my journey through different companies
• Created a Media page highlighting my podcast appearances and conference talks
• Implemented a full contact form with validation and email delivery using Resend
• Set up GitHub Actions and proper security configurations
• Fixed countless TypeScript and linting issues I would never have caught myself

Day 2: The Polish

• Added comprehensive SEO with Open Graph tags and Twitter cards
• Integrated custom icons for the media categories
• Improved mobile UX
• Reorganised and uploaded over 50 images (though we hit some interesting limitations with git and large files that required manual workarounds)
• Upgraded the blog functionality and built a Claude Project to help me write posts

The technical decisions we made together were genuinely smart ones. Claude Code would suggest an approach, explain the trade-offs, and we'd decide together. Using Resend for email because it's reliable and has great developer experience. Organising images by purpose for maintainability. Implementing proper URL encoding to prevent future issues.

What This Really Means

If you're reading this and thinking "that sounds great, but I've never coded before," I need to be honest: there's still a learning curve here. This approach works brilliantly if you have some foundation to build on. I understood concepts like databases, APIs, and how websites generally work. I knew enough to spot when something looked wrong or to ask the right follow-up questions.

But if you coded websites years ago and have been away from it, this could be transformational for you. The fundamentals haven't changed that much – it's just the tools and frameworks that have evolved. Claude Code bridges that gap beautifully.

Here's what I'd tell someone in my position from a week ago: just find some time to get started. I was doing this on a holiday when the weather wasn't very good, so I had the luxury of long, uninterrupted sessions to figure things out. You'll need that focused time initially, though I suspect it'll get much faster once you understand the workflow.

The empowerment factor is real. I'm no longer intimidated by the idea of adding new features to my site. Want to enhance the blog functionality? Let's do it. Need to integrate with another service? Bring it on. That fear of breaking everything and not knowing how to fix it has largely disappeared because I know I have a capable partner to help me work through problems.

The Human-AI Partnership Model

What struck me most about this experience was how genuinely collaborative it felt. This wasn't AI replacing human creativity or decision-making. I provided the vision, the brand direction, the content, and the creative assets. Claude Code provided rapid, accurate technical implementation and helped me make informed technical decisions.

When we hit limitations – like git refusing to push large image files – I could handle the manual upload while Claude Code managed the code synchronisation. When I spotted UX issues or had ideas for improvements, Claude Code would implement them quickly so we could test and iterate.

The result genuinely feels better than what either of us could have achieved alone. I brought the domain expertise and creative vision; Claude Code brought technical excellence and systematic problem-solving. Together, we created something that looks and works like it was built by a professional development team.

Where This Is Heading

I think we're witnessing the early stages of a fundamental shift in how things get built. Not because AI is replacing developers – the really complex stuff still needs human expertise – but because it's democratising the ability to create sophisticated digital products.

For those who've been away from the technical side, this opens up possibilities that simply weren't there before. You can prototype ideas quickly, build custom tools for your business, or create professional web presence without needing to hire a development team or spend months learning modern frameworks.

But perhaps more importantly, it changes how you think about what's possible. When the barrier between "I want this" and "this exists" becomes primarily time rather than technical complexity, it fundamentally shifts how you approach building things.

The Bottom Line

A week ago, I was intimidated by modern web development and resigned to using basic templates or hiring developers for anything custom. Today, I have a website that truly represents my work and brand, with features I designed myself, built through a partnership that felt more like working with a skilled colleague than fighting with complicated tools.

The landscape of building digital products is changing rapidly, and tools like Claude Code are making it possible for people like us to be active participants in that change rather than just observers.