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I let Claude write my first real side project

Sai Heng · Jun 2, 2026

A weekend log of pairing with an AI agent to ship a small habit tracker — what it got right, what I had to redo by hand.

It got the scaffolding right almost immediately: routes, a SQLite schema, a working form. Where it struggled was taste — default spacing, copy that sounded like a template. The fix wasn't fighting it, it was giving it a design system to work from instead of a blank page.

By Sunday night I had something I'd actually use.