I Don’t Know Astro. I Don’t Know Payload CMS. My New Site Is Live Anyway.

My site (chrislema.com) is now an Astro hybrid, hosted on Cloudflare. Partially static, partially dynamic. The blog, for example, is completely dynamic, with articles coming from Payload CMS.

I'm not an expert in Payload CMS because I don't need to be. I don't ever go near it. I installed their MCP as a Cloudflare Worker onto my environment and I write posts and make content edits in Claude, then push it to Payload and my site via that MCP.

Of course, the MCP doesn't work with Claude.ai or Claude Desktop out of the box, because it works via API key. And Claude.ai only works with MCPs that work via OAuth.

Normally that would be the end of the story.

But not these days. I simply asked Claude Code (who had access to the MCP), "Can't you create a proxy or wrapper with an OAuth connection, that then hits the MCP server to connect to Payload CMS?"

That's a lot of words to say, "Claude, can you fix this?"

And it answered, "Absolutely." It created a single-file Cloudflare Worker that was the proxy. And since worker-to-worker communication needs Bindings, it automatically handled that too.

Now, you might think, "But Chris, I don't know anything about MCPs, proxies, or Cloudflare bindings," and I would totally hear you. But my response would be the same no matter what. And I say this a lot:

It's not what you know, anymore. It's what your AI knows.

I couldn't create that worker on my own. But I can surely test it.

The Same Theme, Over and Over

This is exactly the same theme that went into creating the Astro hybrid website itself. Do I know Astro? Nope. But I know how to ask for what I want.

As I worked on this website, here are some of the things I said:

• Everywhere that we do an accent, we use only one single accent color.
• Whenever we list the tools, we use their own accent color.
• If we do a break in a heading, try to break it at the comma or period.

Notice what it's not? No CSS. I didn't need to know anything. I was a true client. Just saying, "Hey could my name in the header be 25% larger than you have it right now," and it would happen.

When I finalized the design system for all my other new products and came back to this site, all I had to do was say, "Here is the written version of the design system, and here are the screenshots of my other sites. Can you update my page designs?"

I don't know how long it took to update 6-12 pages, because I walked away. And when I came back, I barely had any tweaks to suggest.

The Tool Is Not the Interface

I told you, "It's not about the tool. It's about the conversation." And I'm not lying or exaggerating.

WordPress lets me pull content, create content, and put content back in. But the AI work isn't yet ready for me to talk to it like this and have it make design changes any which way (though I'm hearing good things about it getting there).

Here's what I know after building this site: the gap between "I don't know how to do this" and "this is done" has never been smaller. And it's not because the tools got easier. It's because the conversation got smarter.