Claude Code: Build Me a Website

Full video transcript

Hello and welcome in everybody to today’s Claude Mastery Sprint Workshop. We are on week two of our January 2026 Claude Mastery workshop series, where we’re going to be mastering Claude for our business and our life — learning how to use Claude and Claude Code to do all sorts of things that may never have been possible before, to make our lives and businesses easier.

Great to see everybody here today. Want to check in and open the floor as we kick things off to share any big wins that you’re excited about from last week. Our kickoff call was Tuesday, so we’ve had a full week of implementation. That’s the purpose and focus of this sprint: learn by doing and implementing, then use these calls as a container to answer questions, celebrate wins, and get new insights into what’s happening with Claude.

Some of you may have seen Claude Cowork just got announced yesterday. I haven’t had time to dig into it yet — my understanding is it’s a more non-technical, user-friendly version of being able to use the agentic capabilities of Claude Code, which is great. But before we get into any of that, I’d love to check in with everybody. Thanks for sharing that screenshot, Jason — that’s what it looks like. If you have a Mac, Claude Desktop, and the Max plan currently, this may be available to you; depending on when you’re watching, it may also be available on PC.

Any wins out there? One participant shared they built a Claude project to find AI-oriented meetings by geography (county, city, or zip) and date range, excluding machine-learning meetings, and then refined it into a skill they can reuse instead of doing manual searches. Another said their first steps into Claude Code all failed — which is good news, because that’s how you learn and iterate faster than trying to get something perfect on the first attempt.

On the question of why bother learning “nerdy skills” if tools like Cowork make things more accessible: the view is that Cowork is aimed at making agentic capability more accessible for less technical users, but people who understand Claude Code directly will be able to do a lot more than those who don’t — learning it now puts you ahead of the curve.

Other wins shared live: someone connected Claude Code to GitHub and GitHub to Vercel to deploy a wrapper app; someone built a skill for event marketing briefs; someone set up a skill for accountability and hospitality workflows; and one participant, Jason, used Composio to connect a Gamma API key to Claude and generated a full presentation from subscriber split-test data in a couple of minutes, then refined the prompt live during the call to get better visuals and detailed percentage results.

For today’s session, Darby wanted to show an end result first, then reverse-engineer how he got there — introducing Claude Code and GitHub at a basic, fundamental level, then a simple deploy workflow. He shared his screen showing a page he’d built for a live comedy game show for entrepreneurs and founders happening February 5th at Persing Hall in Austin (doors 6:30, show starts 8:00, with a networking mixer). The page includes embedded videos, testimonials, an embedded Luma events calendar, and photos from the last event — and it was coded entirely with Claude Code. He noted that the mobile version took the longest to get right; it was 90–98% working for hours before he sorted out the remaining issues, which he said is common with AI-built projects — the first 80–90% comes fast, then the last stretch takes real iteration.

The site is hosted on Netlify and connected to a domain he already owned, playsidehustle.live, deployed for free by uploading the project folder. All of the code lives in a GitHub repository under his organization, Gen AI University HQ, inside a project called “sidehustle website.” He explained that when you work in a GitHub repository, you create branches to work on specific sections separately, then push and commit that work back to a main/production branch.

The entire build started as a written prompt inside a Claude project — using a prompt template originally shared by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, adapted for a $25 ticket sponsorship structure instead of the original $1,000 example. He gave that Claude project the brand color and style guide, then asked it to turn that into build instructions formatted for Claude Code. He copied those instructions from the Claude project and pasted them into a new Claude Code session.

From there he walked through the Claude Code setup screen: selecting which GitHub repository to use, and configuring an environment with environment variables to store API keys and passwords securely (the same concept as using .env files in Cursor or Windsurf). He showed adding a Firecrawl API key this way, and mentioned testing a Gamma API key too. He shared a “sensitive data protection” best-practices document that a teammate put together, which you can hand directly to Claude Code and have it set up your .gitignore file and secure environment handling for you — his tip: if you’re confused by any of it, ask Claude to explain it for your specific situation and walk you through it step by step.

He then demonstrated creating a brand-new repository from scratch: a free GitHub account, an organization, then “New repository,” naming it (he used “splash landing page” as an example), adding an optional description and README, and creating it. Back in Claude Code, he selected the new repository, opened his sensitive-data file to grab keys, and gave Claude Code a starting prompt: build a sponsor landing page using an uploaded sponsor deck and brand style guide, matching the color and style guide, to present different sponsor opportunities for the live comedy shows — set up the environment first, then wait for further instructions.

Audience questions came up throughout: what actually goes in GitHub if you’re not a coder (GitHub stores all the code, images, and context Claude uses and updates — similar to a knowledge base in a Claude project, but accessible from other tools too); whether GitHub is the source of truth accessible by different apps and AI models (yes — Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Desktop, or Codex can all point at the same GitHub repo); whether skills can read from GitHub (still being figured out — an open question about connecting Claude skills built in Claude projects to code running in GitHub-based apps); and whether Claude Code can work on multiple repos at once (yes — he demonstrated running three or four projects simultaneously over the prior weekend, and live during the call started a second prompt in a different repository for a partnerships page while the first project was still building).

He showed uploading files directly into the GitHub repository — a logo PNG, then a sponsor deck and brand style guide exported from Figma as PDF/PNG and a zip file — committing them to the branch so Claude Code could read and use them. He ran into a platform limit live (only five images could be uploaded at once), and worked around it by uploading in batches. Once Claude Code confirmed it could see the brand colors and sponsor deck content, he asked it to build out the complete sponsor landing page, including partnership tiers and brand styling, and let it run.

While Claude Code worked, the group discussed usage limits and plans. Darby is on the $100/month plan and has hit the usage limit twice, largely from running several projects and heavy experimentation over one weekend — well beyond what he used on the $20/month plan. He noted you can buy additional credits/tokens instead of upgrading your plan tier if heavy usage isn’t continuous, which can be more cost-effective. He’s on $100/month specifically because he uses Claude intensively for these workshops and his own projects, and said even at that tier it beats hiring a full-time developer for this kind of build — though he still works with full-time developers on larger client projects.

To get the finished build live, he went to the repository’s “Code” dropdown, downloaded it as a ZIP, and uploaded that folder to Netlify, which built and deployed it to a production URL. On the first pass, a few things needed fixing — the wrong logo variant was used, and there was a gradient he didn’t want — which is normal for a first build; the next step is sending Claude Code follow-up prompts and reference screenshots to refine the styling until it matches the intended design.

A participant, Charles, suggested using Comet (Perplexity’s browser) for beginners: it sits alongside your browser, can interact with sites like Netlify, Vercel, or GitHub directly, and can fill in what’s needed or explain what’s happening as it goes — useful for getting unstuck when you don’t know what a hosting or GitHub screen is asking for. Darby agreed it was a good tip and said he’d try incorporating Comet more into his own workflow.

He closed by summarizing the full workflow — from setting up Claude Code, connecting GitHub, securing API keys, uploading brand assets, prompting the build, to deploying on Netlify — and said the group would continue building on this at the next session, focused on Claude Code recipes and learning from how everyone is implementing these tools in their own businesses.