I rebuilt the entire website for Coroin Books in a single afternoon.
Four hours, start to finish, with Claude Design and Claude Code.
No agency. No dev team. No ticket queue.
Coroin Books is my publishing imprint, and the books are family memoirs: personal, hand-made, the kind of thing a stock template flattens into "here are some products."
Which is exactly what my old site did: a blue banner, cramped grids, a bare contact form.
It buried the stories.
Here's the part worth your time, though.
The fix wasn't that AI builds fast. It was what I fed it.
Instead of asking for a "publishing website," I gave the tool the real idea: every life story is a work of art worth exhibiting.
That one line did the work. The site stopped being a catalog and became a gallery: black and gold, an editorial serif, each book framed on the wall like a piece in a museum.
It's the same brief-versus-idea gap you can feel in every mediocre deck, landing page, and product spec.
And about that "no dev team": the agents were the dev team.
I can write the code; I've been a CTO seven times and run engineering orgs into the triple digits. I just didn't.
I ran the agents the way I've always run a team: as the architect, product owner, and scrum master. They handled the coding, the design, the QA.
I owned the intent. Every page got the same treatment, and it shipped the same day.
So, the now-what.
Execution used to be the bottleneck: you had the idea, but building it meant money, a team, and a wait.
That's gone.
What's left is the part that was always the actual job: knowing what you want and directing the build until it's right.
The agents don't replace the architect. They replace the wait.
Which means the skill that transfers isn't coding. It's product ownership.
Get specific about what you're actually trying to say, direct the build, and hold the quality bar.
That's the whole trick.
One more thing: I built this to be found from the first commit, structured underneath for search engines and the AI assistants people now ask instead of Googling.
Getting it to actually surface is its own story.
That's the next article. Stay tuned →
Website by Claude Design + Claude Code. Carousel by Claude Design. coroinbooks.com · Follow along @erikcto.