The weekly strip · 63 issues · page 1 of 6
Building with AI
Hands-on patterns and code for people shipping AI features.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Issue 90
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 6 min read
GA4, Tag Manager and Clarity on a static site: what they cost in Lighthouse
Env-var-gated GA4, Tag Manager and Clarity on an Astro site, with a measured PageSpeed run: the third-party bill, its effect on blocking time, and what I would cut.
- Google Analytics
- Tag Manager
- Clarity
- Lighthouse
- Astro
- Issue 89
10 October 2026 · Building with AI · 6 min read
Build an Astro blog: content collections, RSS and per-post OG images
How this site's blog is built on Astro 7: a Zod-checked posts collection, hand-written RSS and satori OG images. Real code, plus where it departs from the docs.
- Astro
- content collections
- RSS
- satori
- Open Graph