Akash's Notebook
Thinking in public — daily notes on building with Claude, development, and whatever's worth keeping.
Building with Claude: Inspect Before You Mutate Shared Infrastructure
I set out to do something that sounded simple: deploy a web app onto a server I already owned. A few hours later I'd learned that the riskiest part of deployment isn't the app at all — it's the moment you touch configuration that other things quietly depend on. This is a story about breaking a bunch of unrelated…
Read →Building with Claude: Code Travels in Git, Config Doesn't
Today I set out to do one thing — add a campaign landing page to my existing Wagtail project and get it live — and ended up learning more about deployment hygiene than I have in months. The build itself was the easy part. The deploy is where I nearly took down a live site, twice. Here's the honest version.
Read →How I get Claude to write my project posts (and what I still get wrong)
A reusable prompt I keep in my back pocket: point Claude at a codebase, get back a publish-ready case study — without leaking secrets. Here's the prompt, plus where I trip up and where Claude does.
Read →Building with Claude: Correct Markup Isn't a Working Feature
Today was one of those debugging sessions that humbles you — or in this case, humbles the AI I was pairing with. What started as a simple "hey, can you check how this form works?" turned into a multi-hour investigation across email plumbing, magic links, and a YouTube embed that refused to cooperate. Here's the honest…
Read →Building with Claude: My Site Was Invisible, and It Wasn't the Code's Fault
My site was live and SEO-perfect, but ChatGPT and Perplexity couldn't reach it and Google had indexed zero pages. The culprit wasn't the code — it was Cloudflare quietly blocking AI crawlers at the edge.
Read →Building with Claude: Don't Delete Your Old Site — Redirect It
I had an old portfolio sitting on a github.io domain and wanted it gone. Claude talked me out of deleting it — and out of the duplicate-content trap I was about to walk into.
Read →Building with Claude: Fake Precision, and Why My Poems Only Show the Year
My imported poems had invented dates — some of them in the future. Fixing the ordering turned into a small lesson about not displaying data you don't actually have.
Read →Building with Claude: It's Not Broken, You're Looking at the Wrong Thing
Twice in one session I was sure something was broken. Both times it was working fine — I was just measuring the wrong thing. A short post…
Read →Building with Claude: Open Code, Closed PDF — Sharing Research Without Getting Scooped
I wanted to put two research papers on my site — one published, one not. Each raised a different question about what you can share, and the answers weren't what I expected.
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