People keep asking me about AI. For a while I had nothing useful to say — I'd tried the courses (never finished them), done the reading, still felt completely lost. Then an old colleague Ahmed sat me down, did a walkthrough and dragged me out of my own spiral about it lol. That's when it clicked: just build something, babe.
So this is what I actually did. The project, the prompts, the results.
The project
I'm a freelance photographer — hobby since school, something I'm proud of. A friend I'd photographed recently asked how she should credit me and I realised my site was embarrassing. Plus I read this:
"What is your website saying? You don't have one? That's silly billy behaviour. We are living in precarious digital times — a dot-com home is non-negotiable."
So I rebuilt the whole thing. hellotanda — 14 years of blog posts and content in 27 days, mostly just talking to Claude and a free Vercel account to host it.
What I actually needed
Before the prompts — here's the setup, because people always ask:
- Claude — free tier works to start
- Vercel — free for personal projects
- Domain name — optional, but I've had hellotanda.com for years. About £40 every two years — cheaper than a Netflix subscription.
- That's it
No paid courses. No local dev environment to configure. Just those two things.
The prompts, in order
I've had a blog since 2012. Blogger, then WordPress — free themes, clunky editors, photos that never looked right. I'm a developer, which meant I had no excuse — embarrassing behaviour.
My prompts were not technical. I described what I wanted the way I'd describe it to a friend. Here's the actual sequence:
Getting started:
"I want to rebuild my personal blog and photography portfolio. Dark background, neon magenta as the accent colour — that's been my brand since Piczo. I want it to feel like me, not a template."
The loading screen:
"Build me a loading screen that types out 'hellotanda' like a typewriter — neon magenta on black background."
Migrating the content:
"I have 59 WordPress posts exported as XML — import them all and wire up the blog routes. Nothing should be lost."
The portfolio:
"Portfolio page — photos should fill the height of the screen and scroll horizontally."
When it wasn't right:
"Revert, doesn't look good."
That last one matters. You're allowed to just say no. You review it, react to it, push back. The taste is still entirely yours.
What made the prompts work
One thing: be specific about the feeling, not just the function.
Less useful: "make it look nice"
More useful: "dark background, the heading should feel like it continues from the loading animation, fuchsia matches the cursor colour"
You're not writing a spec. You're describing what you want the way you'd explain it to someone who's going to build it — because that's exactly what's happening.
Two years of thinking about it. 27 days of actually doing it after work for 30 minutes at a time
Lemme help you out with your first prompt
This works for anything — a blog, a spreadsheet tool, automating something annoying at work, a side project that's lived in your notes app for a year.
If you want to start where I did, steal this:
"I want to build [thing]. Here's what it needs to do: [one sentence]. The feel I'm going for: [describe it like you're talking to a friend]."
That's it. See what comes back.
Till next time xo