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.

Building elaborate R2 architecture with manifest verification felt like professional-grade security until the audit revealed the truth: the manifest was checked at build time and ignored entirely at runtime. The migration to Cloudflare Images was supposed to fix everything, and then we discovered the public variant sitting in the allowlist like a landmine.

Three hours debugging SSR truncation. Five middleware fixes that changed nothing. The problem was build output, not runtime. Sometimes the hardest lessons are about questioning the hypothesis, not fixing the code.