Making Claude do my dirty work

Making Claude do my dirty work

- 6 mins
robotics FLL lego technical jekyll

Demo: https://braineatingmachines.com/pitcrew/

Repo: https://github.com/braineatingmachines/pitcrew/

Since working with my FLL team, I’ve been looking at growth gaps between FLL and FTC, to better equip students to a higher level team. Correspondence with teachers points towards students not being able to articulate their designs and models for 3D modelling and printing or just create a new CNC part. While browsing through multiple websites and forum/Facebook posts around FTC and FRC, I realized a lot of teams build their websites using WordPress. WordPress is a great CMS tool with good plugins and templates. It is a good tool to build your web presence if you are a business. For a cash-strapped robotics team, it is an additional line item on your monthly expense sheet.

As a team that writes code and hosts it on GitHub, GitHub Pages is the perfect place to host your team’s website, directly from a repository on GitHub. I decided to leverage Claude Code, and build a template in Jekyll + GitHub Pages.

I asked ChatGPT and Claude to review some of the existing team websites, and come back with a list of features that should be available on such a template. After a series of back and forth I combined all the notes and created a master prompt for Claude Code to build the template.

AGENT PROMPT: FTC/FRC Robotics Portfolio Website Template

Role

You are an autonomous senior full-stack engineer and technical writer tasked with building a production-ready, reusable website template for FIRST FTC/FRC robotics teams.

The output must be a Jekyll-based static site hosted on GitHub Pages, designed for students and mentors with little to no coding experience.

Your goal is to produce a repository that teams can fork and immediately use.

High-Level Goals

  1. Markdown-first editing (no HTML required for content authors)
  2. Season-aware structure (FTC/FRC school-year seasons like 2025–2026)
  3. Configuration-driven behavior via _config.yml
  4. Automated workflows using GitHub Actions
  5. Clean, modern, responsive UI using Tailwind CSS
  6. Long-term maintainability across many seasons
  7. Accessibility-first, toggleable accessibility mode

Core Constraints (Non-Negotiable)

  • All content pages must be Markdown
  • Contributors should only need:
    • A text editor
    • Basic Markdown knowledge
  • Feature toggles must live in _config.yml
  • No manual copy/paste when seasons change
  • No local Python execution required
  • GitHub Pages compatibility

Technology Stack

  • Static Site Generator: Jekyll
  • Hosting: GitHub Pages
  • Styling: Tailwind CSS
  • Data files: YAML (_data/)
  • Automation: GitHub Actions
  • JS: Minimal, progressive enhancement only

Repository Structure (Target)

/
├── _config.yml
├── _layouts/
├── _includes/
├── _data/
│   ├── team.yml
│   ├── mentors.yml
│   ├── alumni.yml
│   ├── events.yml
│   └── socials.yml
├── _posts/                 # Blog / News
├── docs/                   # ReadTheDocs-style documentation
├── seasons/
│   ├── 2025-2026/
│   │   ├── robot.md
│   │   ├── team.yml
│   │   ├── outreach.md
│   │   ├── gallery.md
│   │   ├── code.md
│   │   ├── cad.md
│   │   └── docs/
│   └── 2024-2025/
├── assets/
│   ├── images/
│   ├── models/
│   └── css/
├── .github/workflows/
└── README.md

Configuration System (_config.yml)

All major behavior must be configurable here.

Required Sections

site:
  team_name:
  team_number:
  program: FTC | FRC
  current_season: 2025-2026

theme:
  colors:
    primary:
    secondary:
    accent:
  dark_mode: true # Adopt system settings, and can also be toggled on the UI too

features:
  blog: true
  docs: true
  cad_viewer: true
  circuit_viewer: true
  code_links: true
  data_visualizations: true
  alumni_auto_archive: true
  accessibility_toggle: true

socials:
  instagram:
  github:
  youtube:
  donorschoose:
  other:
  • Top navigation bar
  • Left: team logo
  • Right: navigation links
  • Mobile-responsive hamburger menu
  • Navigation items configurable via _config.yml

Home Page

The home page is a composite of reusable sections, each backed by Markdown.

Required Sections

  1. Hero / Current Season Overview
    • Game name
    • Robot name
    • Season year
    • Image or video
  2. Join the Team
    • Short paragraph
    • CTA button
    • External form link
  3. Calendar of Events
    • Past and upcoming events
    • Powered by YAML data
  4. Scrimmage Hosting
    • Conditionally visible
    • Event details + registration link
  5. Featured Content
    • Awards, outreach, or blog highlight

Pages to Implement

  • About
    • Team history
    • Timeline
    • Mentors
  • Sponsorship
    • Sponsor tiers
    • Logos
    • Call-to-action
  • Awards
    • Season-filtered
    • FTC/FRC standard awards
  • Contact
    • Contact links or form
  • Team Handbook
    • Markdown-based
    • Printable layout
  • News / Blog
    • Markdown posts
    • Tags & categories
  • Archive
    • Auto-generated by season
  • Alumni
    • Powered by _data/team.yml
    • Auto-move students to alumni based on graduation year

Season-Aware Content System (Critical)

FTC/FRC seasons run Aug–Jun and must be treated as first-class entities.

Requirements

  • All robot, outreach, team, and documentation content lives under /seasons/{season}/
  • Changing seasons requires only updating current_season in _config.yml
  • Older seasons automatically appear under Archive
  • No manual file movement

Media & Visualization Features

Required

  • Image galleries
  • YouTube embeds
  • GitHub repo links
  • CAD viewer (glTF / STL preferred)
  • Circuit schematic display (SVG or PDF)

Optional Enhancements

  • Match statistics
  • Outreach metrics
  • Award timelines

Documentation Section (Docs)

  • Styled like ReadTheDocs v2 ~ check exisiting Jekyll templates and see if you can borrow from there
  • Sidebar navigation
  • Markdown-only
  • Teaching-focused templates
  • Per-season documentation support

MESGRO Integration

Accessibility (Optional)

Implement an Accessibility Mode Toggle Button:

Requirements

  • Visible toggle button in header or footer

  • When enabled:

    • Switch to high-contrast color palette
    • Increase base font size
    • Improve focus outlines
    • Disable motion/animations
  • Accessibility styles must be implemented via CSS class switch
  • Colors must still derive from _config.yml
  • Social media icons
  • Fundraising links
  • Config-driven visibility
  • FTC/FRC-appropriate disclaimers

Automation (GitHub Actions)

Implement workflows for:

  1. Build & deploy to GitHub Pages
  2. Alumni auto-archival (graduation-year based, cron job runs on July 1st)
  3. Season rollover checks
  4. MESGRO content processing

Bonus Features (Strongly Encouraged)

  • “Judge Mode” page highlighting:
    • Robot
    • Awards
    • Outreach
    • Engineering docs
  • Outreach impact metrics page
  • Client-side search (blog + docs)
  • Season comparison pages
  • Accessibility compliance checks

Definition of Done

The project is complete when:

  • A team can fork the repo
  • Change _config.yml
  • Add Markdown files
  • Push to GitHub
  • And immediately have a polished, accessible FTC/FRC website

No web development knowledge required.

Begin by scaffolding the repository, configuration system, layouts, and automation.

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VARUN MEHTA

VARUN MEHTA

engineer | coder | tinkerer | cook | photographer | tryathlete

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