I Built a Weekend SaaS Before I Remembered How CSS Worked
Letting the agent handle layout while I focused on the thing I actually understood: the problem.
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I had a clear idea for a small invoicing tool and absolutely no memory of how to center a div. In 2014 that would have stopped me cold for an evening. In 2026 it stopped me for about nine seconds.
Play to what you still have
What I did remember was the shape of the problem: who the user is, what data matters, where the edge cases hide. So I led with that and let the agent own the parts that had gone stale.
$ claude "scaffold an invoice form: client, line items,
tax, due date. validate totals. make it look clean."
The layout it produced was better than anything I’d have hand-rolled, and crucially, I could read it and adjust. That’s the difference between vibe-coding into a corner and actually building: you stay in the loop, you keep the judgment, you let the boilerplate be boilerplate.
By Sunday night it took payments. Real ones. The CSS, it turns out, was never the point.