The New Site Is Live

I just finished a retrospective (opens in a new tab) with Claude and asked it how I did. It started as a funny idea to see what would happen, but it actually turned up some useful stuff!

Some context

Last week, I rebuilt the site for Tend and Flow. It had been a placeholder and mid-Summer seemed like a perfect time to do it properly. I used Opus 5 in VSCode as my main workbench (everything is happening in either VSCode or Cowork these days!). Based on my brief to make the attack surface as small as possible, we ended up deciding to orientate around markdown files (it’s a low volume site). I used Claude Design to decide the type, palette and wireframe. We built the first version to check the content workflow. Then, again in Design, created and implemented a more thematic aesthetic based on my branding. After the release of v1, I created a specific maintenance skill for ongoing checks, did the tidy up and compacting. Nothing particularly innovative, but it took about three days (of which 60% of the time was really spent on content).

More to Learn

In the retro, Claude called out two things I thought to share with you:

• A few times when configuring the server or coding something, Claude said something was broken and then immediately jumped in to fix it. Turned out the initial hypothesis was wrong and we looped around the problem a few times. We agreed that before trying to fix the thing, we should immediately figure out what the control step is. This taps into a similar concept developers have about designing the tests first, before the coding. So, when Claude reports an issue - before believing a bad result and jumping straight in - we should run a test against a case whose answer we already know. The learnt lesson is for me to stop the conversation and agree the test before proceeding.
• The second issue was the inefficiency of my claude.md and memory files. I was bleeding context between projects in some cases, and it wasn’t picking up the right context in others. It was time for a clean up and making sure the cascade of instructions from claude to projects/ repos was holding the right information in the right place.

Concepts that developers and prompt engineers know well. Learnt lessons for me.