I Built a World Cup Site Without Writing Much Code
Every four years the World Cup shows up, eats my summer, and leaves me wishing I had one good place to follow it. This year I decided to build that place instead of complaining about the ones that already exist. The result is everyfouryears.futbol, a tracker with live scores, group standings, knockout brackets, stat leaders, and more to help you in your journey of possible suffering.
The part worth writing about is not the site. It’s how it got made. I take that back, it’s both.
The agentic coding part
I didn’t write most of the code. I worked with Claude and Claude Code, and the division of labor turned out to be the whole trick. I handled the decisions: what the site should feel like, which data mattered, how the news page should pull from ESPN and Inoreader without turning into noise. Claude handled the implementation, the git history, and the parts of frontend work I am, to be gentle to myself, terrible at, on good day.
If you’ve never tried it, “agentic” mostly means you describe what you want, the model goes and does it, and then you react to real output instead of a blank editor. I’d would describe a feature I wanted, Claude Code would build it, and I would come back to something I could actually click on. That feedback loop is faster than typing, but more importantly it changes what kind of work the project asks of you. You spend your time on taste and structure rather than syntax. The feedback loop is also addicting.
This project and the process was fun, really.
I expected it to be efficient. I didn’t expect it to be fun. I am a lapsed developer (Coldfusion anyone?) so it’s been some time since I wrote code. I had no idea what to expect with this process. What had previously taken hours was reduced to minutes. There is no “Oh, I can’t build something. It’s been too long” to get in the way. A bracket view, a venue page, half-score linescores pulled from a summary endpoint I’d never have bothered wiring up by hand. The site got better because the cost of experimenting got cheaper.
The process and quick feedback also kept the project moving on the nights when I had forty minutes and a vague idea, which is most nights. That’s the real unlock for a solo builder: not raw speed, but never losing momentum.
Why I’m telling you this
I’ve quietly built a handful of these things now, and I’ve decided to stop being quiet about it. If you’ve got a project that’s been sitting in the “someday when I have time” pile, the time math has changed. You don’t need to become a developer or worry about learning new tools since the last time you laid down code. You need an idea you actually care about and a willingness to be specific about what you want.
The World Cup is into its second week. The site is live. Go pick a team to be unreasonable about.