Designer, Maker, Generalist
Vibe Coding

Rebuilt Pafolios with AI

Rebuilt Pafolios with AI

Five years ago, I launched Pafolios as a simple portfolio directory. Today it showcases 700+ design portfolios and gets 10K monthly visitors.

But the site was getting slow. Really slow.

Deployments took 30 minutes. The design felt outdated. I knew it needed a complete rebuild, but honestly? I thought it was impossible to do alone.

My first attempt was a disaster. I asked AI to convert everything to NextJS in one go. Gave up within hours.

Then I tried a different approach:

  • Started with Lovable to build the project structure and foundation
  • Once I hit my free token limit 💸, I connected it to GitHub and synced locally
  • Then used Claude Code for the heavy lifting - optimizing design, refining interactions, migrating content

That third step was 80% of the work - optimizing design, refining interactions, migrating content, building automation.

The result? Deploy time went from 30 minutes to under 2 minutes. The whole rebuild took less than a week.

I'm genuinely proud of how it turned out. Better design, faster performance, smoother operations.

P.S. If you have a portfolio you're proud of, I'd love to feature it on Pafolios.

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