Akash's Notebook
Thinking in public — daily notes on building with Claude, development, and whatever's worth keeping.
Building with Claude: Simplicity Wins When You're Building for Editors
I spent today turning a pile of hardcoded UI into something a non-technical person can actually edit — headers, footers, navigation menus, little accreditation…
Read → FeaturedBuilding with Claude: Finding Passive Income Without Losing Myself
A long, honest conversation with Claude about passive income, identity, and what's actually realistic on an $800/month salary in Bangladesh — plus the simple…
Read → FeaturedBuilding with Claude: Email Is Not the Web, and Config Is Not Truth
Today I built a newsletter system from scratch — subscriber management, double opt-in, provider integration, and a drag-and-drop email composer — and almost every hour of debugging came down to two lessons I had to learn the hard way. The first: configuration is not truth, only the running system is. The second: email is not the web, no matter how much the HTML looks like it.
Read →Building with Claude: The Maintenance Step Was the Bug
Today I killed a documentation page that had been lying to me for months. Not because anyone was careless — because the design required a…
Read →Building with Claude: Certificates Are a Consequence, Not a Cause
Getting a web app from "works on my laptop" to "live on the internet…
Read →Building with Claude: Verify at the Layer Your Users Actually Use
I hit a bug this week that passed every test, cleared the linter, and…
Read →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 →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.
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