Rebuilding this site, part 2: the machinery under the notes
Part 1 covered why the old site had to go. This is about the parts you can’t see from the outside.
The hero. The orrery, the dust and the scramble effect are hand-rolled scripts, no animation library.
The writing guidelines are enforced, not aspirational
The repo carries a docs/writing-guidelines.md based on Wikipedia’s “signs
of AI writing” list, adapted for a personal site. Banned: significance
inflation, reflexive rule-of-three, negative parallelisms, promo adjectives,
essay closers, more than one em-dash per paragraph. Any agent writing copy
for this site must read that file first and run its checklist before
committing. It has already caught me — a heading in an early draft of these
very notes used a word from the banned list and got rewritten.
The same discipline exists in Perpetūra as a CI linter and in SkinAtlas as a canonical style doc. Three projects, one lesson: if you work with machine collaborators, your taste has to be written down or it doesn’t exist.
The glitch system
The design brief was worlds in orbit, machinery that never stops, and the site runs a small glitch layer to keep it feeling alive: an RGB-split flicker on the hero title, a scramble effect that resolves the word “Wandering,” scanlines, drifting dust on a canvas. All of it is a few hand-rolled scripts. The restraint rule: glitches fire on a slow clock measured in tens of seconds, because a glitch you notice twice a minute is a gimmick.
How these field notes get made
The notes series you’re reading was compiled the way the posts themselves describe: research agents fanned out across five repos and a vault, pulled dev logs, git history, design specs and session memories into dossiers, and the writing happened on top of that evidence — checked against the guidelines file, with a standing spoiler policy for the novel saved into project memory so no session forgets it. Screenshots were captured live from the running apps, at proper device-pixel ratios after the first pass shipped blurry.
The site is the smallest project in the lab, and also the one every other project reports to. It’s the front door; the notes are the receipts.