A new era for static site generators

I am no stranger to static site generators, having written a few of them (bari) myself(mdninja) over the years (webgen.py) and of course something I wrote and used for a long time — sitebuild, which powered my site www.btbytes.com for many years. I often considered them to be “Hello World” programs of the 2010s, and even continuing into 2020s, going by there was a post on lobste.rs this week about yet another SSG someone wrote.

What made static site generators really attractive to me, and I guess many other programmers, is:

  • I don’t want to learn some one else’s system.
  • Usually they are too big or too small
  • They don’t have the features I want without .. again learning their system
  • and the problem seems simple enough that you can make it up as you go

But what awaits you on the other side is, a lot of ticky-tacky work, and a system that is never polished enough compared to some of the long term bloggers like - Simon Willison, and Justin Searls, and Daring Fireball(though, a customized version of MovableType) who all have their home grown systems.

This is where LLMs, and AI Coding agents really change the landscape (like they are doing everywhere).

I “vibecoded” this site entirely using Claude Code (to begin with), and Codex (when I ran out of Claude tokens), and most recently with OpenCode (mostly MiniMax 2.1) as I mentioned earlier. This time I didn’t start with a blank slate but instead started with Astro.JS, eschewed using any pre-made templates, or blogging frameworks built on top of Astro.js, and decided to write it myself with the help of coding agents. Having written HTML, CSS, JS and all other parts of website for 20+ years, I had strong opinions on what I wanted.

The experience of building this site can be approximated to having a very good developer that understands everything I know and can produce code exactly (or even better) as I wrote in my “prompts”. You can see them here on gist.github.com

This is no different than chatting with a developer on the other side of the continent.

While I picked the coding agents to write a silly old static site generator, because it is a domain very well known to me, you can chosen some other software (maybe a 2D game, or a data visualization project) and had similar experience.

It is a good time to be a programmer, even though you may be lot, lot less code than you used to, but you are writing more code, and ploughing through your project backlogs.