Weekly Newsletter

Practical AI Strategies

This week on the blog... Building Websites with Claude, and Letting the Robots in

Plus: The Practical AI Library

Hi everyone,

The weekly newsletter is going out a few days late because we've had a house full of sick kids. Not sure about everyone else, but Term 1 is always a bit wild for us! But we're back into it, just in time for the chaos of weekend sports and birthday parties...

Last weekend, I scored a few quiet hours where I could play around and experiment with a few ideas. That included building some websites with the latest model from Anthropic's Claude: Opus 4.6

Building Websites with Claude Code

Claude Code is one of those things that seems intimidating the first time you use it, and then quickly becomes an incredibly useful technology. Firing it up in the command line was a little daunting - even though I do have a reasonable amount of experience coding. that's because this version of Claude can get access to files and processes right there on your computer.

No more web browser based chatbots: this is AI working at the level of your device, and if that sounds a little risky and terrifying, it's because it is... But it can be done safely, and in this article I look at one of the first extended projects I carried out with the program: building websites.

In just a few hours I was able to create, edit, and publish five complete websites, plus a couple of extra pages on my regular site.

Read the article for a full description, links to the completed sites, and a technical step-by-step for anyone willing to wade in to Claude Code.

Read: Building Websites with Claude Code

Letting the Robots in

I also spent a bit of time making some changes to my own website, including making the whole site extra friendly to AI systems. Why on earth would I want to do that?

As an author writing online, and a website owner for over fifteen years, I've seen the impact of things like Google's search algorithm on promoting writing. My site basically lives or dies by the abstract decisions of search engine developers like Google and Microsoft. This newsletter is a great way to share the writing, and yet the majority of my traffic still comes from people stumbling across my posts in a search.

And now, the internet is changing due to AI. AI Agents, including Claude Code, are now visiting sites semi-autonomously. Google's AI Mode means that readers are spending less and less time on personal websites. And an increasing volume of my traffic comes from ChatGPT.

In this article, I explore what that means for authors like me.

Read: Letting the Robots in

The Practical AI Library

Last of all, I wanted to thank all of the hundreds of people who have already signed up for early access to The Practical AI Library.

This curated collection of articles, research, and practical advice stemmed from feedback from this community: you asked for an asynchronous, "slow" way to keep up with the firehose of AI news.

I've put together a collection of library shelves where I regularly add interesting AI news, the research papers I'm referencing myself, and practical strategies, videos and resources.

There's one week left of Early Access: try the library for $4AUD:

Early Access: Practical AI Library

Cheers,

Leon

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