jhsu.xyz

jhsu.xyz was designed and built with Claude — from the first wireframe in Paper to the final commit.

The meta-experiment: apply the same rigor to the portfolio as to any product it exists to frame.

Designing a portfolio is a strange brief — the work has to be confident enough to have a point of view, but restrained enough that it doesn't become the loudest thing in the room. Every decision — forest green, Geist, no hero image, the discipline around animation — came from that tension: how do you make something opinionated without it upstaging what it's supposed to showcase?

Every page was wireframed in Paper before a line of code was written. That's not a workflow preference — it's what kept decisions intentional. Spacing systems, component hierarchy, content structure: all resolved in the canvas, so implementation had a clear brief to follow. The style guide came after shipping, working backwards from production to document what had already been applied — which also surfaced a handful of one-off styles that had quietly drifted from the system.

TiltedCard physics on the work cards was prototyped and cut. The spring physics were genuinely fun — but watching them, it was clear the card was becoming the interesting thing. That's the wrong outcome for a portfolio. The ScrambledText hover on the hero name was the only animation that made it through.

Working with Claude across the whole build — architecture, implementation, content, code review — reinforced something that applies to any collaborator: velocity and direction are different things. Claude was fast; I was responsible for what we were building toward. The real skill wasn't prompting — it was briefing. Specificity about intent, not just instructions.