Tools: How I Built My 8-bit Portfolio With Claude Opus 4.5 On Antigravity

Building a developer portfolio in 2025 feels different than it did just a year ago. The tools have evolved, AI has become a legitimate coding partner, and the line between "designing" and "developing" has blurred in the most exciting ways. This is the story of how I built my retro-futuristic portfolio—and how an AI assistant named Claude became my most reliable pair programmer.

My long-standing fascination with the aesthetic of old-school video games and the neon-soaked visuals of cyberpunk fiction naturally guided my vision. When rebuilding my portfolio, I aimed to create a digital experience that felt like stepping into a futuristic arcade—a place brimming with pixelated fonts, glowing terminals, and nostalgic scanlines. The challenge was to seamlessly blend all that retro charm into a modern React application.

The challenge was making it more than just a gimmick. A portfolio needs to be functional first. It needs to showcase real work, be accessible, and actually help me connect with potential collaborators and employers. The 8-bit aesthetic had to enhance the experience, not get in the way of it.

Before writing a single line of code, I spent time in Figma mapping out the experience. I'm a firm believer that jumping straight into code leads to endless refactoring later. Having a visual reference meant I could make design decisions without the pressure of implementation looming over me.

The design process helped me establish the color palette—electric cyan, neon green, sunset orange, and deep space purples against dark backgrounds. I mapped out the sections: a dramatic hero with my name in pixelated glory, an about section that tells my story, a skills showcase with animated progress bars, projects displayed as terminal windows, and a contact form styled like a command-line interface.

Here's where things got interesting. I'd been experimenting with AI coding assistants, but my experience with Claude Opus 4.5—specifically through an agentic coding platform called Antigravity—was different from anything I'd tried before.

Instead of treating the AI as a fancy autocomplete, I approached it as a true collaborator. I described what I wanted to build, shared my design files, and watched as Claude helped me scaffold the entire React project structure. It suggested component architecture, helped me set up GSAP animations, and even caught accessibility issues I would have missed.

The magic wasn't just in code generation—it was in the back-and-forth. When so

Source: Dev.to