How I Use Claude Code as a Senior Full-Stack Developer

I treat Claude Code the way I'd treat a very fast, very literal junior engineer who never gets tired: genuinely useful for the mechanical work, and never the one making the calls that matter.

The loop I run is the same one I'd run without it — understand the problem, plan the change, implement, review, test, ship — with one difference: the implementation step is now AI-assisted rather than something I type end to end myself. I still scope the slice small enough to ship in a day. I still decide what "done" means before opening an editor.

Where it actually earns its keep is the mechanical work: scaffolding a new screen or endpoint from an existing pattern, refactoring a component after a data-model change ripples through a dozen call sites, hunting down where a regression was introduced, or mapping an unfamiliar part of a codebase before I touch it. That's real time back — hours that used to go to typing and searching now go to the decisions that actually need judgment.

What doesn't move is architecture, security, and what ships to production. I review every diff the same way I'd review a pull request from a teammate — not a rubber stamp because "the AI wrote it." If I can't explain why a change is correct, it doesn't ship, regardless of who or what typed it.

This site itself was built this way — in the same small, reviewable slices, held to the same bar. AI accelerated the build. It didn't make the calls about what the site should say or how it should be structured. That distinction is the whole point.