A few weeks ago I had an idea for a news site and zero ability to build it. I’m a performance marketer by trade and I don’t know much about coding. I tried to vibe code a different project with Cursor + Sonnet a few months ago and kept hitting walls, but fast forward to today and the improvement is wild. I decided to try Claude Code with Opus 4.6 and just… see what happened. The result is thenewsdial.com — a community-curated news aggregator that only links to paywall-free articles, with a political bias rating system driven entirely by community votes. Think Reddit meets AllSides, but free. What’s actually built:
- Full Next.js 14 app with Supabase backend
- Community voting + political bias slider on every story
- RSS auto-ingestion pulling from various approved outlets every 2 hours
- Auth, comments, submit flow, mobile-responsive
- Deployed on Vercel What the experience was actually like: Honestly surprising. The thing that worked best was having a regular Claude chat window open alongside Claude Code. A lot of responses from Code I would feed into Chat, and ask for clarification and how to send clear next steps to Code. I would send Code’s plans to Chat and make sure Chat thought they made sense. I learned to use Plan Mode before any multi-file task, clear context between phases, and write handoff docs between sessions. When I did that, it was remarkably coherent across a large codebase. The hardest part wasn’t the code, it was knowing what to ask for and in what order. What’s Next: The website is still rough in places. The bias slider styling is fiddly on Safari. A few RSS feeds return 403s. Not all stories show a corresponding photo. But it works, it’s live, and I built it without knowing TypeScript three weeks ago. Would love feedback from this community especially, both on the product itself and on how you all approach Claude Code for projects like this. What workflows have clicked for you? 🔗 thenewsdial.com submitted by /u/DrStemSell
Originally posted by u/DrStemSell on r/ClaudeCode
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