In September a friend talked me into trying Claude Code. Two months later I use it every day, and my WordPress site goes live on its own when I push a change. This series is how I got there.
In short:
- A friend showed me Claude Code working on plain text notes on his own computer, and challenged me to try it with WordPress.
- I used my own site, inesmedem.com, as the test, from 14 September 2026.
- The goal was continuous deployment: push a change, and it goes live on its own.
The call
When I came back from Spain in September, my friend Jorge jumped on a call to catch up on life. Jorge is a product manager, not a developer. He spent a good part of the call telling me about his local Markdown files, the agents he had working on them, and how much they were helping him.
I was sceptical. I was already using AI for real work, well past chatting: agents that write and run code from the terminal, and some that keep working in the background while I do something else. I didn’t see what a folder of text files would add to that.
He kept insisting, so I tried it. I haven’t stopped since. It has helped me a lot, I feel like I’ve progressed a lot, and it’s been fun.
What are local Markdown files?
This is the part that made it click for me, so it’s worth explaining.
- Markdown is plain text with a few symbols for formatting:
#for a heading,-for a list item. Any app can open it. - Local means the files sit in a folder on your own computer, not inside an app’s cloud.
- Claude Code runs on your computer and works inside a folder. It can read the files there, write new ones and run commands.
Put those together and your notes stop being something you copy and paste into a chat. Claude can read them, add to them and act on them. My notes live in Obsidian, which is just a nice way to look at that folder.
The challenge
Jorge knows I work with WordPress, and part of why he called was to ask whether we could work out how Claude Code and WordPress fit together. I took the challenge on, and used my own site as the test.
My goal was, at the very least, continuous deployment. In plain words: the site’s code lives on GitHub, a copy runs on my laptop, and every change I push goes live on its own, without me copying files across by hand. Part 2 explains it properly.
I started on 14 September. After every session I wrote down what I’d built, what I’d decided and what had tripped me up. Those notes are what this series is made from.
Two months on, this is where it stands:
- The site’s code goes live when I push a change.
- Pages start as designs in Claude Design and get built as WordPress blocks.
- My old blog posts have moved across, with their original dates.
- I write posts in my notes, and one prompt puts them on the site. This one included.
What’s in the series
- How Jorge talked me into it: this post.
- Code, content and continuous deployment: a WordPress site is two things, and they move differently.
- A home and a local copy: picking a host, and running the site on my laptop.
- Push to deploy on a cheap plan: how a change gets from my laptop to the live site, and why my cheap hosting plan made that tricky.
- Designing with Claude Design: designing pages first, and keeping the designs next to the code.
- Editor vs code: what happens when you edit a page in WordPress’s editor, and why that’s a problem for tracking changes.
- Moving my old blog across: bringing old posts across, with SSH or without it.
- Publishing a post with one prompt: from a note in my vault to a live post.
Who it’s for
Jorge, and people like him: comfortable with a computer, not scared to try things, but not developers. I’ll explain the technical words as they come up.
It isn’t all solved, and I’ll say where it’s rough. For one, the deploy still runs from my laptop, which is on my list to fix.
Try this
Make a folder with a few notes in it, as plain text or Markdown files. Open Claude Code in that folder and paste this:
Read the notes in this folder and tell me what they're about. Then suggest three ways to organise them, and ask me which one I want before changing anything.Watch what it does with your own files. That’s the moment it clicked for me.
Next in the series: code, content and continuous deployment.
