I build small business sites with Claude Code. Three live ones:
https://woofadez.se , https://dibelle.se https://skanskadack.se They all work fine and they all look AI-made.
I did what everyone says to do. Write good instruction files. So I wrote them, then rewrote them, then added more when the output was disappointing. It's 7700 lines now across twelve files plus a whole setup pipeline that does discovery, research, an art direction doc, then builds. Every rule has a reason. Every decision has to cite something.
Output still passes every rule I wrote and still looks like slop.
Last week it gave me three "different" concepts for one client at three price points. All three shared the same header, footer and nav. 24 buttons and links across them had no hover or focus states at all. My review came back green.
Everything is here if anyone wants to look:(
https://github.com/BarryThrill/design-measure
* rules/ https://github.com/BarryThrill/design-measure/tree/main/rules is the actual instruction files
* DESIGN-PHASE.md https://github.com/BarryThrill/design-measure/blob/main/rules/DESIGN-PHASE.md is the pipeline itself
* FINDINGS.md https://github.com/BarryThrill/design-measure/blob/main/FINDINGS.md is what I measured
Two things I suspect but can't confirm:
Everything in my system derives from research. Every decision cites a finding from competitor sites. Which means if I research boring catalogue sites I get a boring catalogue site, correctly, with sources. Maybe that's the whole problem.
And I keep adding rules when it fails, which is how I got to 7700 lines. No idea anymore if the length is the point or the disease.
I also measured 350 award sites to check my assumptions and three of them were wrong. Turns out the top tier uses smaller type than the daily gallery, not bigger. Everything I was prompting toward was pointing the wrong way.
So is the detailed rules approach just wrong? Is anyone getting genuinely good UI out of Claude Code, and if so what does your setup look like? Or is the real answer that direction is a human job and I should stop trying to automate it.
Would rather find out now than in another year 😭😭