If you're reading this, you're looking at a website that was almost entirely rebuilt by Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. And honestly? It was one of the most interesting side projects I've done in a while.
The backstory
My personal website had been running on Hugo for years. It was built with the Bootstrap 3 "Agency" and "Clean Blog" themes — functional, but showing its age. The styling had that unmistakable 2015 vibe: heavy shadows, rigid grids, and a design language that felt more like a startup landing page template than a personal site.
I'd been meaning to modernize it for a while, but between work and life, it kept falling to the bottom of the to-do list. Then I thought — why not see what Claude can do with it?
What changed
Pretty much everything:
- Dropped Bootstrap 3 — replaced with modern CSS using custom properties, CSS Grid, and Flexbox. No framework dependency needed in 2026.
- Dropped jQuery — vanilla JavaScript handles everything: smooth scrolling, mobile menu, scroll animations, and form submission.
- Fixed all the broken paths — the old site used absolute URLs (
https://mmmarco.com/...) everywhere, which meant nothing worked when previewing locally. - Unified the design — the homepage and blog pages used to be two completely different templates. Now everything shares one clean stylesheet.
- Removed Hugo artifacts — categories, tags, pagination directories, XML feeds... all the generated cruft from a static site generator I was no longer using.
- Created a simple blog build system — instead of Hugo's complexity, a single Python script converts Markdown files into blog posts. Write a
.mdfile, run the script, done.
The design
The new look is clean and minimal: a teal-and-slate color palette, the Inter typeface, generous whitespace, and subtle animations that respect the prefers-reduced-motion setting. The hero sections use gradient overlays on photos, cards have gentle hover effects, and the timeline on the homepage actually looks like it belongs in this decade.
What I learned
Working with Claude on this was surprisingly collaborative. I'd describe what I wanted — "fix the broken styling and pick a fresh modern look" — and it would make decisions about color palettes, layout systems, and code architecture. When something wasn't right, I'd course-correct, and it would adapt.
The whole process felt less like using a tool and more like pair-programming with someone who has very strong opinions about CSS custom properties.
What's next
This blog now runs on the simplest possible setup: Markdown files in a _posts/ folder, a Python build script, and static HTML served by GitHub Pages. No build tools, no npm dependencies, no config files. If I want to write a new post, I create a Markdown file and run python3 build.py.
Sometimes the best stack is the one with the fewest moving parts.