How I Built a Vinyl & Hi-Fi Community with AI-Assisted Development

Alex RV — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 00:21:30 +0000

I wanted to build something around two things I have been passionate about for years: vinyl records and music.

That idea became El Club del Vinilo, a website that started as a music and vinyl magazine and gradually evolved into something much bigger: a community, a music discovery platform and a place to explore the culture surrounding physical music and Hi-Fi.

What is El Club del Vinilo?

The website brings together several different experiences in one place.

There are articles about new vinyl releases, established albums and Hi-Fi equipment, as well as content about music and the culture surrounding physical formats.

The community side allows users to create and share their own vinyl collections and Hi-Fi setups. The idea is to make the website useful not only for reading, but also for discovering what other music enthusiasts are collecting and listening to.

You can explore the project here:

https://elclubdelvinilo.es/

A website designed around listening

One of the sections I am particularly happy with is Café Concierto.

It contains hundreds of live concert videos organized by musical genre, making it possible to browse performances ranging from jazz and rock to electronic, blues and many other styles.

There is also a floating music player that stays available while browsing the website. It allows visitors to listen to music featured in articles without having to leave the page they are reading.

This was an important part of the original idea: I didn't want the website to be just another music magazine. I wanted music to be present while people explore it.

Building it with AI

A large part of the development process has been done with AI-assisted development.

I have used Claude and other AI tools to help design features, write and refactor code, debug problems, work with databases and turn ideas into working components.

AI didn't replace the process of deciding what the website should be. The difficult part is still figuring out what is worth building, how the different pieces should work together and what the user experience should feel like.

But AI has dramatically changed what one person can build.

Features that would previously have required a much larger amount of development time can now be prototyped, tested and refined much faster.

The interesting part: connecting everything

The biggest challenge hasn't been creating individual features. It has been making all of them work together as one coherent website.

Articles, user collections, music, videos, Hi-Fi content and community features all have different requirements.

The goal has always been to make the website feel like one place rather than a collection of unrelated sections.

There is still plenty to improve and many ideas I would like to add in the future.

Why I built it

There are countless websites about music, vinyl and Hi-Fi. I wasn't trying to build another generic music blog.

I wanted to create a place that combines music discovery, physical media, Hi-Fi and community, while keeping the experience focused on actually enjoying music.

And building it with AI has made the whole process an interesting experiment in what a single creator can accomplish with today's tools.