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Building My Portfolio Into a Publishing System
From Static Site to Publishing System
Inventing a Content Model for Real Projects
Publishing Dense Technical Work Without Watering It Down
Owning the Seams: Plugin Forks and Toolchain Drift
Turning the Site into a Portfolio Editorial Machine
LLM Tooling for Portfolio Writing
The benefits of trad-coding

The benefits of trad-coding

7th article in Building My Portfolio Into a Publishing System
Software Trad Coding Project Solutions Land
2026-5-28

After my tokens ran out I realized how valuable hand-coding is

Gatsby dead (and stinky)

It was all seeming so easy. Gatsbyjs appeares to be no longer maintained after an acquisition by netlify, and I have had endless problems with its ecosystem lock-in. I was prompting up a storm, asking the LLM (gpt-5.4) to enumarate the features of my site, then to propose a migration to next.js + contentlayer

TODO: look up exact session prompt

It mentioned that contentlayer was poorly maintained, and my independent research showed that next.js is heavily tied into vercel, and proposed astro-js. Yea, sounds good!

Prompting up a docs!

In another session I asked it to take the summary of work,

Start fresh contexts to

Through several rounds of revisions and handing docs off between models I had an execution plan in place, and started the classic “Execute step 1” prompts

Token Loss

Token Loss, The Grok era

And after stage 1, 2, and 3 I… ran out of weekly rate cap in my copilot subscription. I attempted to use grok to make any headway, but it fell into very familiar rounds of thinking with little actual progress. It was not able to comprehend the tasks I asked of it despite the copious documentation I had slopped out.

Trad-Coding

Local LLM

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From Static Site to Publishing System Inventing a Content Model for Real Projects Publishing Dense Technical Work Without Watering It Down Owning the Seams: Plugin Forks and Toolchain Drift Turning the Site into a Portfolio Editorial Machine
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