Your Basic Blog

This blog post exists because I was in the middle of building the blog system and said, "Write a blog post about this." That's it. That's the workflow.

How It Works

There's no CMS. No admin panel. No auth. No database. No deploy pipeline for content. It's markdown files in a /blog/ directory inside a Next.js repo. Drop a .md file with some front matter, and it shows up.

---
title: "Your Basic Blog"
subtitle: "How this blog works"
date: 2026-02-12
readingTime: 4 min
---

Content here...

The front matter is minimal on purpose. Title, subtitle, date, reading time. Images are auto-detected -- put a .png or .jpg in public/blog/ with the same name as the markdown file and it just appears. No image? No problem. The post renders without one.

How I Write Posts

I'm usually in the middle of something else. Building an experiment, refactoring a component, debugging a layout. Then a thought crystallizes and I say something like:

"Hey, write a blog post about X."

Claude writes the markdown. It lands in the blog/ directory. The blog index picks it up. Done.

There's no context switch. No opening a different app. No logging into a CMS. No switching mental modes from "building" to "writing." The writing happens inside the same conversation where the thinking happens.

The Architecture in 60 Seconds

The blog system is modeled after the docs viewer that already existed in this repo. Same patterns, different presentation:

• blog/ -- Markdown files with YAML front matter
• lib/blog/loadBlog.ts -- Scans the directory, parses front matter with gray-matter, sorts by date
• app/(blog)/ -- Route group with its own layout, card index, and post pages
• next-mdx-remote -- Renders markdown server-side with remark and rehype plugins

The editorial typography comes from an earlier experiment called "You're Doing It Wrong" -- Cormorant Garamond for headlines and body, DM Sans for metadata, dark background, 680px max-width. When I liked how that experiment looked, I said "codify this into a blog system" and here we are.

Why Not a Real Blog Platform

Because every layer between thought and published artifact is friction. A CMS means logging in. A deploy pipeline means waiting. A database means managing state. An editor means learning another interface.

Markdown in a repo means the blog is just files. Version controlled. Portable. Readable without any tooling. And the authoring happens conversationally, in the same terminal session where I'm already working.

The Meta Part

This post is the proof of concept. I was building the blog system, got it working, and mid-conversation said "write a blog post about how we made this blog." Claude had all the context -- the file structure, the design decisions, the workflow -- because it just built the thing.

No notes to gather. No outline to write. No draft to revise in a separate tool. The context was already in the conversation.

That's the whole point. The blog isn't a product. It's a side effect of working in public with an AI agent. The writing is a natural extension of the building.