Aayush Goenka

Learning to build something real with AI is more fun

I had a fun time yesterday, having Claude mentor me. I added a code.md file in the repo to capture some of the learnings and instructed Claude to add comments to all pieces of code so I could easily follow. Another thing that helped was asking Claude to not execute it directly, but share the code with me and ask me to create, edit or delete the right files. This way I understood how and why certain pieces of code worked and were connected. Super fun.

However, I didn’t want to just make some toy apps. I wanted to work on a real project while I was learning. So I pivoted to redesigning and launching my website. In the process I skilled up in a lot of areas: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Astro, Git, and hosting.

One interesting thing that happened was, as I was copying the essays from the previous version of the website, it became clear to me that it was a repetitive task and there must be a better way of doing this. So Claude helped me add Astro to the codebase by hand, no scaffolder, and moved the shared shell into a single file. My homepage went from a full page of HTML down to a few lines. Neat!

And this whole time, Claude was being a mentor to me, challenging me to experience the problem first and then guiding me through what the right way to do it was. It was as sweet as an AI can get.

Try adding this to your Claude.md file and see for yourself:

Always

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