There’s a black hole in my brain, and it’s shaped like TypeScript.

This morning, I called my mom and told her I think we’re living through the industrial revolution of our time. I realize my 68-year-old mother isn’t exactly the target audience for that take, but sometimes it’s wild to stop and notice that we’re living inside a moment of history. And it isn’t a single day. It keeps going.

Most historic moments happen in a day, maybe a week. This one has been unfolding for years, and I have no idea how long it’ll last. What I do know is that I’m enjoying the ride.

Today, I applied for my dream job. I spent the whole day riffing with Claude and rewriting my case studies. Somewhere in there, I realized that three of my highlighted projects are a time capsule of front end development.

A little context

(In case this blows up, because my SEO skills are top tier.)

I’ve been building websites on content management systems since 2015. A year hasn’t passed without me designing or building a new one from scratch. Mostly custom themes on WordPress. I could stand on a soapbox all day about how much I hate drag-and-drop builders, but that’s a story for another time.

In 2019, I started learning React and built my first headless WordPress site. I did it alongside my full-time job as a founding product designer, fueled by determination, curiosity, and probably too much caffeine. I was obsessed with performance and Lighthouse scores. When I built a site that scored all green 100s, I couldn’t believe it. I thought those numbers were a carrot on a stick! I was hooked, and I wanted to make more.

Harland: sugar for a toddler

Fast forward to late 2025. My agency partner of eight-plus years decided it was time to jump on the headless WordPress train, and you’d better believe I was ready with my conductor hat on.

The site was Harland West Hollywood: large imagery and a luxurious font pairing. Chef’s kiss. By then, I’d built quite a few headless sites and knew I wanted to start from my own foundation. It was also when Copilot became a main part of my workflow. You’re telling me AI can read my files? I don’t have to paste code into a browser like a caveman? Or, dare I say, Google something? Insane.

I became unstoppable. I wasn’t the strongest JavaScript developer, but I understood what React needed from me. Because I’d spent years designing flexible components, I had a vision: a clean file structure, SCSS attached to properly cased files, and clearly labeled variables. I could use GSAP to my heart’s content and ask Copilot for image animation ideas. It was like giving a toddler sugar for the first time. I wanted it all, because suddenly I could make anything I’d ever imagined.

GSAP pinning used to trip me up, and those debug markers haunted my sleep-deprived nights. Now, it just… worked. Better yet, I finally learned the proper way to set it up.

Ascaya: quiet luxury

Next came Ascaya, a luxury homes site out of Las Vegas. I took what I’d learned from Harland and pulled back the reins on animation. Call it the quiet-luxury version of GSAP: small fades that let the content shine.

This time, I wanted to see how far I could push AI. Does it understand schemas and ACF? If I give it the fields for each component, can it handle the mapping? Turns out, yes. I finished the site 36 hours ahead of my estimate. (How I track my time is a whole post of its own. [Link coming soon.])

Near launch, I wanted to see if the interactive map could run even smoother, so I brought out the big dog: Claude Code. It was my first time pointing AI at an entire project instead of feeding Copilot individual files. In minutes, it found everything slowing the component down and handed me a smoother map than I knew was possible.

That raised a new question. If Claude Code is this good, can it read Figma artboards and decide what the components are on its own? I had to know.

Palette Town: the dream store

That led to Palette Town, the headless Shopify store I’d wanted to build for years. I can’t tell you how many times I tried and failed. My GitHub was littered with repos like AdvancedHeadlessShopify_WithBlog_v2. I deleted them the other day, and it was exhilarating.

It was also my first site in years without WordPress. Since Claude Code was going to build the whole thing, I kept the content in Markdown and let Shopify handle the products.

Like every site I design and build, it started in Figma with variables, flexible components, and auto layout. Then I handed it to Claude Code. I told it to use Ascaya as the architectural reference and to structure styles as SCSS modules, flowing from abstracts to variables to mixins.

Christmas came early, folks. I was looking at a near-exact replica of my homepage, with products pulling live from Shopify. I still had to hold its hand to get the styling pixel-perfect, but it was more than I’d dreamed.

The cost

I’ve centered my career on building websites with content management systems, and I’ve grown my engineering skills slowly but surely over the years. But nothing, and I mean nothing, prepared me for how much AI would change the way I think. The way I build. The way I dream.

All great things come at a cost, though. AI catches edge cases and typos I miss. It lets me build faster and free-fall into creative oblivion. But the more I build, the less I remember about building Harland by hand. I need a refresher on mapping and writing props. I was so close to TypeScript finally clicking, and I never quite got there. I’m so busy making, designing, and building that I don’t have time to go back to the fundamentals.

If I want my dream job, and honestly if I want to keep growing at all, I need to remember the girl who was determined to build a headless site. The girl who spent hours on one pinned animation, testing for the right way to scrub an element off the screen.

I work alone, in a studio of one, and sometimes I wonder if others feel this same fear. If you do: welcome. Welcome to my revival blog.