A Design Engineer’s Guide to Agentic Coding: Six weeks rebuilding my website with Claude, Codex, and a team of subagents.

If you’re reading this post via RSS, I encourage you to visit the website this time—you’ll find an overhauled design, refined information architecture, and a modernized tech stack. After my last job ended abruptly in December 2025, I had a few months of spare time before starting my new role. I decided to dive deep into agentic coding and learn as much as possible. As a design engineer, I was mostly curious how well these models and workflows perform when producing front-end interfaces and designs. The Experiment I subscribed to Claude Code Pro at the beginning of 2026 and tested how well the different models could turn random Pinterest layouts into responsive designs. The initial results were promising and confirmed that the models could produce interfaces closely resembling the source designs. However, even the most advanced and expensive model, Claude Opus, struggled with certain layout challenges—such as horizontal text positioned along the edge of a photo. It lacked the intuitive…