i built this site with two ai tools. one got cut.

The first thing I did wasn't write a prompt. It was an audit. I ran a Claude skill that gives a full design assessment of a website: layout, typography, content strategy, all of it. I took notes on what worked and what didn't, and those notes became my spec.

The spec went into Google AI Studio first. The goal was a fast starting point, and it delivered one. Within minutes I had a working landing page I could open in my IDE, run on localhost:3000, and start editing.

But a launch point isn't a product. Three problems showed up fast. The output had a template look, the kind of page you've seen on a hundred other sites. Sections rendered buggy in spots, and fixing them by hand ate the time the tool was supposed to save. And it would only generate a single-layer landing page. I needed a six-page site. No amount of prompting got me there.

So I changed the question. Instead of asking how to fix the AI Studio output, I asked what Claude could do if I set it up properly.

Setup turned out to be most of the work, and that's the point. I built a design system in Claude first: color profiles, font collections, the visual rules every page had to follow. Then I wrote a heavily detailed prompt and uploaded it. After a little while, Claude followed the instructions and produced HTML template pages for the entire site. Not one landing page. The full six-page structure.

Deployment was the easy part. I zipped the Claude design files, uploaded them to Netlify, and the live site matched what I'd visualized in Claude. Edits still happen in the IDE and in Claude Cowork after testing on localhost, but the core build was done.

If you're planning a similar build, spend your effort before the generation step. The design assessment and the design system did more for the final product than any single prompt. Front-load the thinking. The tool follows.

Next experiment: once traffic builds, I'll hand Claude the analytics and see what it wants to redesign first. It built the site. It might as well critique it.