Building this portfolio

This site was built together with Claude Code — not generated in one shot and cleaned up after, but co-built screen by screen, decision by decision, over several sessions in Figma. What follows is an honest account of what that actually looked like: what got explored and thrown out, what a critic pass caught that I'd missed, and a pattern I only noticed once I started editing by hand.

The homepage started as four competing visual directions, built out in parallel as real, editable Figma frames rather than flattened mockups: a bold geometric system, an orange-and-black direction, a hand-annotated notebook style, and a fourth direction that got ruled out early for reading as generically "AI-made." I picked the notebook direction — book — for its editorial character. The others were archived once the choice was clear, not left cluttering the file as half-considered alternatives.

Design Rig runs fresh-context critic passes — agents that see only the artifact, not the conversation that produced it, specifically so they don't inherit my own blind spots. One pass caught something I'd missed entirely: a testimonial placeholder had been "fixed" by adding a pending caveat underneath a quote that was still fully fabricated and still the most visible text on the card. Removing the caveat wasn't the fix. Removing the fake quote was. Other passes flagged real inconsistencies too — stale bio copy left over from an earlier draft, a case study that quietly asserted a decision had been made when it genuinely hadn't.

The clearest pattern showed up late, when I started refining the homepage by hand instead of asking for more passes. Every edit I made was a subtraction: fewer work-history entries, no more decorative card illustrations, one footer call-to-action instead of three columns, a redundant in-page nav link removed once the section headings could do that wayfinding job on their own. None of it was prompted — it just kept happening. That pattern is now written down as a standing default for this project, not just a one-off cleanup.

The site isn't finished, and this post is still a draft — same honesty rule as everywhere else here: nothing gets marked done until it actually is.