The website looked fine until it didn't.
I'd spent the better part of the day giving Cliqology an actual identity — a real brand, not just a name floating above a generic template. Miami Aqua. Sunset Coral. Deep Marine. I had hex codes, a logo set, a brand guide document, the whole thing. It felt like progress. Then I pushed the changes to the site and the hero section came back white. Not the right white. Just... white. Empty. Like the design had shrugged.
This was supposed to be a light day. The goal was to get Cliqology's visual identity locked down and reflected on the actual website. I'd been operating without a real brand system — colors chosen on instinct, no documented logic behind any of it. I wanted to fix that.
I started in Google Gemini, using the Nano 2 model (I've been calling it “Nano Banana 2” in my head and I'm not stopping). I used it to build out the visual identity first — the asterisk logo mark, the split-color treatment, the full logo set. Then I went back to Gemini to turn that visual system into a structured brand guide: a markdown file with hex codes, typography rules, spacing logic, implementation notes for CSS and email and Google Workspace. A proper source of truth.
Both of those outputs came out of Gemini. Then I brought them into Claude Code and said, essentially: take this brand guide and apply it to the project. Claude Code did that — and then I did something I'd been doing manually up to this point. I let it push to GitHub. That part worked fine. No drama, no hesitation. I watched it run and didn't intervene. It felt like handing off a set of keys.
Then Came the Screenshot
The site wasn't rendering the custom colors. The hero sections and the final CTA block that were supposed to be Deep Marine (#005778) were coming back white. I couldn't tell from the code what was wrong — so I took a screenshot and dropped it into Claude Code.
First diagnosis: the dev server needed a restart to pick up the Tailwind config changes.
I restarted. Still white. Second screenshot.
Second diagnosis: the Tailwind config had the colors defined as flat keys with hyphens — "cliq-navy" — but Tailwind v3 expects nested objects to generate bg-cliq-navy style classes. It was looking for colors.cliq.navy, couldn't find it, and silently skipped the whole thing. One config fix, no component changes needed.
That fixed it. But I sat with the sequence for a minute. Claude Code had written the config, deployed the config, and then needed two screenshots to correctly diagnose why the config it wrote wasn't working. The first answer wasn't wrong exactly — it was just incomplete. Directional, not diagnostic.
What I took from that: Claude Code is confident in a way that can outpace its accuracy. That's not a flaw to work around, it's just something to hold onto. The tool is fast and capable and sometimes it needs you to push back.
What Didn't Work
The other thing that didn't work the way I wanted: image editing. Gemini Nano 2 is fine for structured generation — give it a brief, get a usable output. But when I tried to use it for image work, the results were less than optimal. That part of the workflow still needs a better answer. I don't have one yet.
What I'd Do Differently
Reserve longer blocks of time for AI sessions. Today I was working in fragments — a few minutes here, pick it up later, lose the thread, reorient. That friction is real and it compounds. AI tools reward continuity. You build context as you go, and every interruption costs some of it. Next time I do a day like this, I block the time like it's a meeting.
A Footnote Worth Mentioning
Yesterday I had a conversation with Jeff Booth — author of The Price of Tomorrow — about his own experiences with vibe coding. The enthusiasm was genuine and specific. He mentioned a few tools I haven't tested yet, including something called Google Antigravity. That's a separate thread. More on it when I get there.
For now, the brand is in. The colors are rendering. The push to GitHub is no longer something I do manually.
The site looks like something now.