Part 2: Connecting the Tools (and a Question Worth Parking)

With a design picked, the next step in August 2026 was getting my tools talking to each other. Claude can connect directly to services like Sanity and Supabase through what are called connectors. Once connected, it can look at my content and database itself instead of me copying and pasting everything back and forth.

The first surprise: restart required

I connected both services, went back to the chat I had open, and nothing was there. The new tools simply didn't appear. The fix was to start a fresh chat. New connections often only take effect in a new session, much like a configuration change that needs a restart before the system sees it. Anyone who has bounced a server to pick up a new setting will recognize the feeling.

Drafting the content model

At my direction, Claude drafted the full set of Sanity schema files: the definitions for projects, articles, videos, authors, homepage settings and search engine details. A schema is just the record layout for each kind of content. Claude offered to build a test version to try out, but I chose a setup checklist instead, so I'd know every step needed to get my development environment ready.

One honest note: I wasn't sure where the Next.js project folder lived on my Mac, and that question was still open when the session ended. There was a bigger catch too. Those schema files existed only in the chat. I never saved them into my project, and in the next part you'll see what that cost me.

A question worth parking

A couple of weeks later I asked whether Buy Me a Coffee memberships could automatically give people roles in a Discord community. Claude found that there's no built-in connection between the two. It could be done with custom glue (Buy Me a Coffee notifications, my Supabase database and a Discord bot), or more simply with a no-code automation tool like Zapier or Make. I decided to hold Discord, along with a planned logged-in "uber user" feature, as future updates.

Nothing got built, and that was the right call. Asking the question took a few minutes. Building the answer would have taken a weekend I needed for the site itself.

The lesson

A file the AI drafts in chat lives only in the chat until you save it into your project. And ask "does it connect?" before you build. Sometimes the answer is a weekend of glue code, and it's fine to park it.

Try it yourself

Whenever an AI hands you a file, save it into your project folder right away, even if you aren't ready to use it. And before you commit to an integration between two services, ask the AI whether they connect natively. If they don't, ask what the simplest version would look like and decide whether it's worth it now.

Next time: building the real site, and discovering that most bugs aren't about logic at all.