The Website That Investigated Itself

The site you're reading, filed as evidence. Rebuilt in 2026 with Vite, React 18, TypeScript, and Tailwind — by a team of AI agents working in parallel from a written brief. One of them wrote this case file. Hello.

The brief

Version one was a pixel-accurate homage to a 1986 Apple IIGS. Charming — but the nostalgia was doing the portfolio's job, and serious visitors had to squint through retro chrome to find the resume.

The new brief: keep the desktop-OS bit (a nod to PostHog's homepage), lose the museum piece. Warm paper, an illustrated Iowa scene, draggable windows, copy with actual jokes.

The suspects

• Option A — keep the retro pixel OS. Memorable, already built, beloved by exactly the demographic that does not hire consultants.
• Option B — a modern illustrated OS. Same windows and easter eggs, with real typography, real accessibility, and content that works both in a draggable window and as a normal scrolling page.

Option B confessed under very light questioning.

The method

The part clients should actually care about:

• Brief first. Color tokens, type system, full site map, and a voice guide with banned corporate words — all written before any code.
• Contracts second. A fixed WindowId union and a shared window registry, locked down so parallel work integrates instead of colliding.
• Then AI agents, in parallel. Orchestrated in Claude Code, each agent owning specific files: window manager, menu bar, the layered SVG scene, and content writers per window — including the one typing this sentence.
• No window library. A small reducer-based window manager — React context plus useReducer, with actions for open, close, focus, drag, and z-order. About 140 lines.
• No image assets. Every illustration — the barn, the detective, the folder you clicked to get here — is hand-authored inline SVG.

The verdict

Drag this window somewhere — that drag is the deliverable. The site about me shipping software with AI agents was itself shipped by my agents: to a brief, in parallel, reviewed by a human. A portfolio is supposed to be proof, and this one is load-bearing.

Want the same trick performed on your business — a real brief, AI doing the heavy lifting, a human accountable for the result? That's the service.