Tools

A while ago I redesigned this site with Claude. This time I asked it to do something far less glamorous: look at the repo and tell me what was messy. What followed was a textbook example of how a perfectly reasonable cleanup can quietly break things — and how having a second pair of (synthetic) eyes makes the fix painless. The audit The site runs on Hugo with the PaperMod theme, deployed to GitLab Pages. Claude poked around and came back with a tidy list of issues. The two that mattered: ...

My personal site has been running on Hugo with the PaperMod theme for a while now. It worked fine — clean, fast, readable — but it also looked like roughly ten thousand other Hugo sites on the internet. No real personality, no visual identity. Just a list of posts and a default color scheme. Time to change that. I decided to work through it with Claude, starting from a simple question: what can we actually do here without rebuilding everything from scratch? The answer turned out to be quite a lot. We started with a custom CSS file — a single file that overrides PaperMod’s defaults without touching the theme itself, meaning future theme updates won’t wipe my changes. In went a bold orange accent color and a new font pairing: Syne for headings, DM Sans for body text. Two changes that sound small but immediately made the site feel like mine. After that, we switched the homepage to PaperMod’s profile mode, replacing the plain text intro with a proper landing block. Finally, adding cover images to posts transformed the post list from a wall of text into something that actually invites you to read. ...