MKCOMICSHire me

The weekly strip · 102 issues · page 1 of 9

What shipped, and what to build with it

One post a week on the AI models and tools that matter to people shipping products: dates, prices, limits, and what I would actually use. Primary sources only.

  1. Issue 102

    13 October 2026 · From the case files · 9 min read

    Building a 34-second comic-book intro: page curls, a trailer score and the autoplay rule

    How the site's opening became a motion comic: rejected loaders, a 14-strip CSS page curl, recorded music and effects timed to their peaks, and why it waits for a click.

    • Web Audio
    • CSS 3D
    • autoplay policy
    • motion design
    • Astro
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  2. Issue 101

    11 October 2026 · From the case files · 8 min read

    Chasing 100 on PageSpeed: what actually moved on a comic-book portfolio

    Twelve deploys, one score at a time: contrast fixes, llms.txt, a Tamil font stall worth 600 ms, content-visibility, and the Lighthouse noise that caps mobile at 99.

    • Lighthouse
    • PageSpeed Insights
    • Core Web Vitals
    • accessibility
    • Astro
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  3. Issue 100

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Hiring-manager SEO: what a portfolio should rank for

    A portfolio does not need to rank for 'software engineer'. It needs to win your own name, then earn long-tail pages that prove the claim. What Google's guides say to do.

    • SEO
    • portfolio
    • careers
    • structured data
    • Google Search
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  4. Issue 99

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 8 min read

    Measuring Core Web Vitals on an animation-heavy page

    LCP, INP and CLS on a page full of GSAP and Lenis scroll animation: what each metric counts, which patterns it ignores, and a PageSpeed workflow that does not mislead.

    • Core Web Vitals
    • performance
    • GSAP
    • Lenis
    • PageSpeed Insights
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  5. Issue 98

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 8 min read

    GitHub contributions at build time, with a committed fallback

    How this site fetches its GitHub contribution calendar in the Astro build, falls back to a committed snapshot, renders SVG, and a parser bug I found in my own code.

    • Astro
    • GitHub
    • build-time data
    • GraphQL
    • SVG
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  6. Issue 97

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    GSAP and Lenis for scroll choreography without hiding content

    How to animate on scroll with GSAP ScrollTrigger and Lenis without pre-hiding content, with reduced-motion handling, using this site's real script and its one flaw.

    • GSAP
    • Lenis
    • ScrollTrigger
    • animation
    • accessibility
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  7. Issue 96

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    A comic-book portfolio: the design decisions, in public

    Why this portfolio is drawn as a comic issue: the audience, the worlds it replaced, the DESIGN.md rules, and what a hiring manager sees on the first screen.

    • design
    • portfolio
    • Astro
    • design system
    • DESIGN.md
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  8. Issue 95

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Opus 5.5 on a legacy codebase: what it handles, where it needs a human

    Anthropic and early testers report Opus 5.5 running audits and migrations for hours. What is reported, what is unverified, and a review discipline for legacy code.

    • Claude Opus 5.5
    • legacy code
    • coding agents
    • code migration
    • code review
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  9. Issue 94

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Skills and plugins for coding agents: packaging team process

    What Claude Code skills and plugins are, where they live, what they cost in context, and how the impeccable plugin keeps design rules out of this site's prompts.

    • Claude Code
    • skills
    • plugins
    • coding agents
    • impeccable
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  10. Issue 93

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 6 min read

    Writing a CLAUDE.md that actually helps

    What belongs in a CLAUDE.md and what does not, from Anthropic's docs, with a 30-line example for a real Astro repo and the rules, imports and hooks that replace the rest.

    • Claude Code
    • CLAUDE.md
    • developer experience
    • context
    • Astro
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  11. Issue 92

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 6 min read

    Claude Code for a solo engineer: the workflow that shipped this site

    How this portfolio was built with Claude Code: the plan and task files, per-section commits, the impeccable plugin, and what the repo shows did and did not work.

    • Claude Code
    • workflow
    • Astro
    • impeccable
    • solo engineer
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  12. Issue 91

    10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 7 min read

    Prompt caching for coding agents: why stable context cuts Claude Code bills

    How Claude Code's prefix cache works, what breaks it mid-session (model switches, MCP changes, compaction), and the arithmetic of a 100k-token session on Sonnet 5.5.

    • Claude Code
    • prompt caching
    • coding agents
    • Claude Sonnet 5.5
    • cost optimisation
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