Building the Tuonela Platform

I asked my AI assistant for a quick overview of static site generators. Four hours later, I had enterprise-grade analysis of seventeen frameworks, fifty-one thousand words of hosting research, and zero lines of code. The decision was always going to be Astro.

Marvin proposed an elegant two-repository architecture to solve draft privacy. GitHub Actions crossing repos. PAT tokens. Clean separation of concerns. I asked one question: "Why can't we just use a single private repo?" Sometimes the clever architecture is just complexity in disguise.

Some things you can't cost-effectively build yourself. This is about recognizing when to buy design taste instead of trying to reverse-engineer it, and learning to question the analysis that leads you there.

Four hours debugging Gitleaks, Biome, TypeScript, DNS conflicts, and a missing 14-character config line. We migrated to Workers for SSR and native bindings we'd never use. Twenty-four hours later, we'd migrate back.