§ 01 · What we builtA blog built for curious builders, demystifying AI one story at a time
are we there yet? is a field journal of normal people building real things with AI , explaining exactly how it was built with the exact tools laid out. I designed it, built it, and pushed it live in a few hours of work.
A personal blog — Are We There Yet — where I write about regular people building real things with AI. I wanted to see what I could actually do with Claude Design and Claude Code to build a lightweight blog. This could have technically been started on substack or on wordpress but the essence of this idea is to prove that normal people can build incredible things with AI. So I built my own: a Next.js site that turns Markdown files on my laptop into a fast, static website hosted on Vercel. I'm able to write a post, push to GitHub, and it's live. During the process I also realized that the MDX file format was unappealing to write in so during the building process I asked Claude to create something more user friendly to write and publish with, so it spun up a CSM using KeyStatic. Now I'm able to write in a user friendly environment and publish posts quite easily.
§ 02 · Problem being solvedAn easy way to publish content and highlight the tools and process behind incredible ideas
I wanted a writing home I actually owned. But I also didn't want to rebuild the boring scaffolding every time I published — SEO tags, social-share images, RSS feed, sitemap, share buttons, reading-progress bar. So I built a template that handles all of that automatically. Every new post inherits the polish for free.
I also wanted two ways into the system depending on my mood:
- A visual editor (Keystatic at
/keystatic) when I want forms and drag-drop images. - A terminal command (
npm run new) when I already have a polished draft from a Google Doc or an LLM and just want to paste it in.
§ 03 · What was the hardest partHow the hell am I going to publish content?
Keystatic. Getting the visual admin editor to play nicely with the custom MDX components I'd already designed. Keystatic had its own opinions about how MDX should be serialized, and my components had different opinions. They kept fighting. I'd save a post in the admin, and Keystatic would silently strip my thumbnail path, or break my <Lede> tag, or refuse to recognize a field I'd defined. I spent half a dozen commits in a row just teaching them to share the same MDX format — widening the schema, loosening the components, moving image folders around. None of it was glamorous, but it was the work.
§ 04 · What went wrongThe cursive font took down the layout for three hours.
We were loading Allura via @import inside the stylesheet. On the first deploy, Vercel served the CSS from a CDN edge that hadn't fetched the font yet, and every cursive accent rendered as Times — which broke the kerning, which pushed the headline to two lines, which made the whole front page look like a 2008 WordPress blog.
§ 05 · What you learnedThree lessons, in descending order of smugness.
One: the brief is 80% of the work. We thought we were "vibe-coding" — what we were actually doing was writing very long, very specific English sentences about what we wanted, and watching Claude type them into HTML.
Two: opinions over options. Every time Claude offered us three directions we got worse output than when we said "do this, in this exact way." Generative tools amplify whoever is loudest in the room. We made sure that was us.
Three: the weird stuff is what makes it a magazine. Anyone can ship a black-and-white serif site in a weekend. The cursive annotations, the margin scribbles, the red question mark — those took about six hours total. They are why the site has a feeling.