Introduction

I’m currently using an AI coding assistant in my day job, and based on my experience, I wanted to test the tools available in this space. With the popularity of AI-powered development tools, several command-line interface (CLI) assistants have emerged to help developers work more efficiently. This post explores and compares the major players based on my hands-on testing.

This blog post is about using a specification for a specific non-trivial change and letting the assistant work out the best approach, rather than the incremental step-by-step prompting I typically use for smaller improvements.

Introduction

After building this blog and writing the first post in collaboration with Claude Code I wanted to understand how easy it would be to recognise that the post had some AI involvement. This post will be primarily written by me with some suggestions from Claude.

I’ve never investigated this area, but I assume it’s a big concern for blogging sites such as Medium or longer-form sites such as Substack.

I decided to start a blog and wanted to try something different - building it entirely with Claude Code as my development assistant. I gave Claude Code full permission to execute commands and edit files directly on my system. This post chronicles my experience creating this Hugo-based blog from scratch, where every line of code, every file, and every command was executed by AI through our conversation.

Starting Simple

I had Hugo already installed on my Mac (via Homebrew), but beyond that, I was starting completely fresh. My goal was simple: create a clean, fast blog that would showcase posts with previews on the home page.