LinkedIn caps your story at a headline. GitHub hides the work in private repos. If you build with AI, ship products, write, or run experiments, a personal site gives the work a proper front door. Mine was built with Claude over a couple of months, starting with no frontend experience.
I packaged its bones: the files this site uses, the personality intact, and the palette gathered into one block at the top of the stylesheet. Unpack it, swap your identity, and you have a site that reads like a person on day one. Then make it weird in your own direction.
In the box
The starter
- One stylesheet,
tokens.css— the whole look in a single file: palette, type law, the grain-and-lamplight ambient layer, and the shared chrome. Editing the top of it re-skins everything. - An identity block — the fonts and the whole palette live in one marked section at the top of
tokens.css. Change those; keep the craft. - Clean templates — a home page and an essay page, already wired to the spine. No build step, no framework, no
node_modules. - The discovery layer —
llms.txtandhumans.txt, so humans and AI agents can read and cite your work. - A README that walks you from the unzipped folder to "live on your own domain" — the five steps below, written down.
It's static — HTML, CSS, a little vanilla JS. It reads clean to crawlers, including the LLM ones. No React, no build step, nothing to maintain but your own words — the one thing it pulls from another host is the Google Fonts stylesheet at the top of tokens.css, and you can drop that too.
Five steps to live
.dev, .io, or .com that fits your identity.The art of prompting it forward
Once the box is live, you grow it by conversation. Don't ask for "a portfolio" — give it identity, then keep asking for what you want. You don't need the technical terms; describe the outcome:
"I'm a [role] with [X years] in [domain]. Keep the bark-and-lamplight look but make the accent cooler. Add a writing section that reads like a field journal, and a projects shelf with status pills."
You say what you want to happen; Claude figures out how to build it. That's the whole trick. Domain, repo, host, prompt, ship — and you have a site you can keep growing by conversation instead of by tutorial.
Get the box
Download the starter as a zip, unpack it, and you have the box. It is built to lift cleanly into its own repository when you want one. Change every value in the identity block and my palette and fonts are gone. The layout, the type rules, the grain and the lamplight stay.
Download the starter (.zip) → Read the README →