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carriekroutil.com — this very site

Jun 23, 2026
A gradient-glass browser window with a blinking cursor and floating spec cards
Live siteGitHub

This site is itself a project — and one I built in public using agentic spec-driven development.

At work we’re adopting an AI-native approach and trialing the BMAD method — a spec-first workflow — and this site was my first go at it. The full paper trail (brief, PRD, UX, architecture, epics and stories) lives in the repo’s _bmad-output folder, and an AI coding agent (Claude Code) built the site one story at a time, with a retro after each completed epic. I wrote up how the method actually felt in that post — short version: front-loading the thinking made the building calm. If you want to try the method yourself, there’s a step-by-step BMAD 101 in the handbook.

Overall, I was delighted by the experience — and now I find myself wanting to try it again on something more complicated.

Under the hood

Most of the interesting work here was in the decisions, not the stack. A few I’m glad I made:

  • Reading works with JavaScript off. The core experience is clean, static HTML — fast on a phone, resilient anywhere. Search is the one exception that earns its keep.
  • Tags are an open taxonomy. Add a lowercase word to a post and the topic page, the chips, the sitemap, and the Home/About lists all wire themselves up — add one, get the rest for free.
  • Privacy-first analytics. A lightweight counter (GoatCounter) tells me how many people read a page without setting cookies or tracking anyone — so there’s no annoying cookie pop-up to dismiss.
  • The tooling enforces the standards. Missing alt text or a bad date fails the build, so accessibility and correctness aren’t left to good intentions.
  • One deploy pipeline, no drift. A single AWS Amplify app builds from one committed build spec; publishing is just git push to main. No CMS, no console tinkering, one source of truth.
  • A custom design layer over Hextra. Gradient wordmark, dark-default theme, design tokens, and accessible cards — shadowing the theme rather than forking it, so upgrades stay painless.

The whole planning paper trail lives in the repo, and if you’re curious how it all fits together the README covers authoring and local setup while SETUP covers the deploy pipeline. It’s the home base everything else here links back to.