Projects / Portfolio Site - sathishkannan.com / AI Collaboration Log
What I learned about AI-assisted development by building this site
I built this entire portfolio site — CMS, admin panel, public pages, profile management — using Claude in a chat window over several sessions. Here's what I actually learned.
THE GOOD:
Claude held the architecture well within a single session. When I described the folder structure, the routing requirements, the database schema — it produced coherent code that fit the constraints. It caught things I hadn't specified, asked the right questions, and the output quality was high.
For a solo developer working on a side project with limited time, it compressed weeks of work into days. The CMS that would have taken me a month to build from scratch, with all the admin pages, the access control, the content types — that came together in a few focused sessions.
THE CONSTRAINT:
No memory across sessions. This is the fundamental limitation of chat-based AI for software development. Every new session I was re-establishing context: here's the folder structure, here's the hosting environment, here's what we decided last time. The tool was capable. But I was the persistence layer.
This is not a criticism — it's just an accurate description of what chat-based AI assistance is. You're working with something that's very capable within a context window and starts fresh outside it.
WHAT CHANGES WITH CLI TOOLS:
I haven't documented Gemini CLI and GitHub Copilot here yet — those are coming. But from what I've explored so far, the difference is exactly this: the tool sees the codebase. It reads your files. It knows what you built last week without you explaining it again.
That changes the workflow significantly. It's not just faster — it's a different kind of collaboration.
THE HONEST SUMMARY:
Chat-based AI got this site built. It was the right tool for starting from zero without a clear specification. I'd recommend it for exactly that use case — early stage, exploratory, working out what you want to build.
For ongoing development of an existing codebase, the context limitation starts to cost you. That's when CLI tools start making sense.
I built this site to document that transition. The fact that this entry exists is the first piece of evidence.