how this site was built (and why that is the point)

Before a line of code, there was a docs folder: identity and positioning, career history, cognitive profile, a master inventory of every tool I've built, voice rules extracted from my actual writing, a site brief, and a feature spec. Eight markdown files. That pack is the spec for the person — and the ground rule on file one says nothing here is invented. Anything unverified is flagged and held back, which is why a few case studies say “pending clearance” instead of showing screenshots.

The visual language existed before the site did — a personal design system called Ink & Paper: warm paper, near-black ink, one oxidized-copper accent, Newsreader for the long-form, Inter for the UI, JetBrains Mono for the metadata. Hairlines do the structural work. No gradients, no glass, no shadows except one allowed exception. It was designed against a single test: if a stranger met only the system and then met me a week later, would they feel prepared, or misled?

Claude Code read the pack and the system, then built what you're reading: Next.js with TypeScript and React, content as typed data, the design tokens as plain CSS — no framework fighting the system. Deployed on Railway from a Dockerfile — the personal tier of a two-tier setup: the production work fleet runs on an internal AWS container platform (ECS/EKS Fargate, managed Postgres/Redis/S3, CI/CD by manifest); personal tools and this site ship to Railway. The repo carries its own CLAUDE.md, because the spec-to-agent handoff is the working method, not a demo of one.

A few deliberate details for the people who inspect: the resume is a literal markdown file at /resume.md — curl it, diff it, feed it to your AI. There's an llms.txt for the agents that read sites now. Case studies for tools built through agentic workflows include a “view the spec” toggle, because the spec is the product artifact. And ⌘K works.

Disclosure, per this site's own rules: Google Analytics runs here — page views, nothing exotic.

The claim on the homepage is that I spec, architect, and ship production systems through agentic workflows — on top of 14 years of manual code. The cheapest proof was to build the portfolio the same way and let you read the seams. Recursive, on purpose.