Building the Nevada AI Research Institute Website
How this website was built by talking to an AI coding agent, prompt by prompt: what was asked, what the agent did, what it took from the user, and what a specialist would still need to check.
This playbook records how the website of the Nevada AI Research Institute (NAIRI) at the University of Nevada, Reno was built by talking to Claude, an AI coding agent from Anthropic, in Claude Code. The site is a Django and PostgreSQL application on a single Ubuntu machine. It lists AI funding calls, faculty and their publications, projects, events, playbooks, videos, news and a blog. An administrative assistant curates it from a review queue and can edit any wording on the site in place.
The first day, 7 September 2026, produced the plan, the running site, a daily agent that searches Grants.gov and other sources for funding calls and new faculty, and a first real crawl. The rest came in short sittings over the next four weeks:
- a morning AI news gathering, run as a Claude Code skill;
- MatchMaker, which proposes faculty teams for open calls and cites each member's papers;
- a static copy on a CSE department web server, with a password-protected teams page;
- funding sources for Defense, DARPA, Labor, Agriculture, Education and SAM.gov, and a blog.
The user wrote 102 prompts and no code. The agent wrote about 16,000 lines of Python, including 464 tests, in about 50 commits, over about 11½ hours of working time. With no API key, relevance is scored by keywords rather than a language model, and the weekly newsletter, the chat assistant and the local-model connection are not yet built.
The playbook gives the prompts verbatim, leaving out 17 housekeeping ones, with what the agent did and where the user's judgement changed the course. No security, privacy or university IT specialist has reviewed it.