Takeaways From Building a Custom Micro.blog Theme Using Claude Code and Claude AI

Building a custom visual theme for Micro.blog presents unique challenges at the intersection of web design, static site generation, and AI-assisted development. This blog post captures practical insights and lessons learned from creating a custom theme with Claude Code and Claude AI, including key considerations on Hugo compatibility, plugin conflicts, and theme architecture.

• Claude AI isn’t well-trained on Micro.blog architecture and dependency on Hugo static website generator. Claude doesn’t make a clear distinction between Hugo’s capabilities and Micro.blog’s unique features.
• Plugins are a challenge because they might inject conflicting formatting instructions into your custom-built theme. It’s hard to debug.
• Plugins can conflict with each other.
• Don’t use the latest Hugo version (0.158) and stay on 0.117 if you use many plugins. By removing low-value plugins, you increase your chance of using version 0.158.
• The workflow for updating a GitHub repo hosting your custom theme to the deployment on The process of Micro.blog is tedious because it’s manual and slow, especially for large websites and Hugo rendering engine. Hugo 0.158 could help, unless it conflicts with one plugin that you need.
• More than ever: less is more. Keep it simple, and problems will be kept at bay: removing low-value plugins can make a big difference.
• Test the website after each plugin removal, force a rebuild of the entire site to cleanup things. It’s slow but it might help debug later.
• If a plugin introduces support for smart code in blog posts, after removing that plugin, Hugo will generate errors. These blog posts need to be either updated or deleted.
• If the custom-built theme covers a specific design area, like a /photos page, don’t use a plugin touching the same area, prioritize the custom-built theme and skip the plugin. The idea is to have a self-contained custom theme.
• Stay away from abandoned-ware plugins.
• Prefer adding stuff in the custom theme instead of relying on an external plugin, so the theme is self-contained.
• The lower the number of plugins, the better the chance you can use the latest version of Hugo.
• Using the custom.css functionality, which helps externalize and override the custom-theme’s styling, speeds up testing different styling options.

Creating a custom Micro.blog theme using Claude AI revealed both the power and limitations of AI-assisted development in specialized ecosystems. While the tools provided invaluable support, the real breakthroughs came from hands-on debugging and understanding the unique interactions between Hugo, Micro.blog, and plugins. These takeaways form the foundation for a more robust theme architecture—one that will continue to improve with future iterations.

I’m still not done with my design. As I progress, you can visit my test blog.