Hire a senior Claude Code developer — direct engagement, real production track record.

Writes the spec. Sets up project-specific Claude Code skills, hooks, and memory before commit one. Reviews every diff the model produces before merge. Picks the architecture, makes judgment calls on edge cases, ships the final code review. The model handles boilerplate, repetitive transformations, test scaffolds; the engineer handles judgment, architecture, and production safety. Anyone claiming the model does it all alone is shipping unsafe code.

Three differences. Speed — well-defined features ship in days not weeks because boilerplate is no longer a billable hour. Cost — the per-feature cost is 30-50% lower than equivalent contractor work for similar scope. Setup quality — your project leaves with not just code but a Claude Code harness (skills, hooks, memory) that your future contractors can inherit. The work compounds.

Primary stacks. Next.js + React 19 + Server Components on Vercel. Astro with content collections or headless CMS on Netlify or Vercel. Supabase Postgres + Auth + Storage. Tailwind + shadcn/ui. Stripe billing. Anthropic Claude API for AI features. Adjacent: Payload CMS, Sanity, WPGraphQL, Cloudflare Workers, FAL for image gen. Out of scope: Java, .NET, Ruby on Rails, native mobile, embedded.

Yes — direct engagement is the default. Three shapes available. (1) Solo senior consulting — audits, architecture reviews, fixed-price feature builds where I am the named engineer. (2) Agency engagement through Seahawk Media — for larger builds where you want a team behind the senior, with project management and QA included. (3) Hourly retainer — for ongoing capacity with no defined endpoint. Disclosure: I co-founded Seahawk Media, so agency-routed projects include standard agency cost structure. Direct engagements skip that overhead.

Discovery call within 5 business days. Spec written within 3 days of discovery. Engagement start within 5 days of spec sign-off. For audits and short feature builds, start can be as fast as 1 week from initial contact. For multi-month engagements, expect 2-3 weeks from contact to start because the scoping phase produces a better-defined project than a rushed one.

Five clauses that matter. (1) Scope — written list of deliverables with explicit "not included" line items. (2) Milestone payments tied to verifiable outcomes, not time elapsed. (3) IP ownership — code and assets transfer to you on payment; the Claude Code skills + memory developed during the project transfer with the code. (4) Communication cadence — weekly written summary minimum, daily Slack or Loom updates during active sprints. (5) Termination terms — either side can exit with 7-14 days notice, prorated for incomplete milestones. Anyone resisting these five clauses is signalling something — usually that they have been burned on a past engagement and are over-correcting at your cost.

No, because the deliverable is the code itself plus the harness that produced it. You receive: the project codebase, project-specific Claude Code skills in .claude/skills/, hooks in .claude/settings.json, memory files in .claude/memory/, documentation generated during the build, plus CI / deploy / SEO linter scripts. Your future engineers (yours or mine) open Claude Code on the repo and start with the same context I had. The handoff is real.

Three patterns. (1) Project-specific Claude Code skills lock down conventions — testing framework, deploy commands, file structure, naming. The model checks against the skill, not its general knowledge. (2) Memory files capture the project-specific quirks the model needs to remember across sessions. (3) Hooks in settings.json gate destructive operations — no direct production writes, no unsigned pushes, no skipping typecheck. The harness, not memory, prevents incidents. Net result: production failure rate comparable to traditional engineering, with faster remediation when issues do happen.

Yes — most clients are US-based. Time-zone overlap is 4-5 hours daily on Eastern, 1-3 hours on Pacific. Async via Slack and Loom covers the rest. Payment in USD via Wise, Stripe, or Mercury. Contract under English law by default; US-state-specific terms negotiable for enterprise clients. Direct engagement bills in USD; agency engagement through Seahawk Media is also USD-billed.

Three reasons. Twelve years of senior engineering practice — Claude Code is layered on top of real production experience, not a substitute for it. Twelve thousand WordPress sites shipped at Seahawk Media — same engineering judgment applied to a faster delivery shape. And this site (gautamkhorana.com) is the proof — Astro + Supabase + Vercel, built with Claude Code, with a working LLM citation tracker, programmatic SEO, schema correctness, and an admin layer that survives an Ahrefs audit. If you want a Claude Code developer who ships the work he talks about, this is it.