Both fbdesign.org and frankpaints.com were designed and built entirely solo. No agency. No engineering team on retainer. Claude and Cursor were the build partners — but every product call, every typographic choice, and every "no, not that" stayed with me.
What changed
For twenty years I've led design on teams where shipping meant handoffs — specs to engineering, rounds of review, weeks of alignment. These two sites compressed that loop. I could sketch an interaction in the morning, argue with the model about hierarchy by lunch, and have something live to react to by evening.
That speed is real. But it's not magic. The bottleneck moved from production to judgment: knowing what to build, what to cut, and when the output looks polished but solves the wrong problem.
How I used the tools
Cursor handled the craft layer — layout, responsive behavior, refactors, the unglamorous work that used to eat weeks. Claude helped me think through structure, copy, and edge cases before they became bugs. I treated both as collaborators with narrow lanes, not oracles.
The portfolio site needed to read like a principal designer, not a developer flexing a stack. The art site needed to feel like a studio — warm, personal, unhurried. Same toolchain, completely different intent. The tools don't know the difference. I do.
What I'd tell a peer
If you're a senior or principal designer wondering whether this is "your job" now — it always was. AI doesn't replace taste, stakeholder fluency, or the ability to say no. It removes excuses for not shipping.
Start with something you own end to end. You'll learn faster from a live site than from another framework tutorial. And keep a record like this one — your contemporaries are figuring it out too.