Change anything by asking

Your site works. Now make it yours. Everything in this lesson is a message to Claude.

How to ask so Claude gets it right

1. One change at a time. “Make the title bigger” works better than ten changes in one message.
2. Say what you see. “The menu is squashed on my phone” helps more than “fix the menu”.
3. Paste errors exactly. If something breaks, copy the whole error and paste it. Don’t retype it.
4. Look after every change. Refresh your browser and check before you ask for the next thing.

Things to ask for

Copy any of these and change the words in capitals.

Write a blog post:

Write a new blog post called "MY TITLE". Here's what I want to say: MY NOTES.
Keep my words where you can, and fix the spelling.

Change the look:

Change the colours to a dark blue and white, and use a friendly, rounded font.
Show me before you change anything else.

Add a page:

Add a Contact page with my email address, MY EMAIL, and add it to the menu.

Add a picture:

I put a photo called me.jpg in the src/images folder. Put it on the About page,
small and round, next to my name. Use Astro's Image component.

Want more? Our Astro prompts to copy has twelve, and the prompt builder writes one for you.

Check Claude’s work

Claude is very good, and sometimes wrong. Three habits catch nearly everything:

• Look at the change before you approve it. Claude shows what it will add in green and remove in red. If it’s changing something you didn’t ask for, decline and say so.
• Check the build. Every few changes, ask: “Run npm run build and fix any errors.”
• Know the usual mistakes. AI tools sometimes use Astro features from older versions. Our list of mistakes AI makes with Astro shows what to watch for.

Undo a change

Don’t like something? Say so:

Undo that last change.

To make undo easy, ask Claude to save as you go:

Set up Git for this project if it isn't already, and commit what we have now
with a short note.

A commit is a saved version of your whole site. Once you have commits, you can always go back. Lesson 4 sends them to GitHub, so they’re safe even if your computer breaks.