After shipping the big moves (autoflow, new engine, PDF export), we paused for a structural pass: encapsulation, centralization, and tests for the parts agents touch.
We replaced a 170KB presentation framework with a custom engine in one session. What we learned about CSS, testing, and knowing when a dependency has outlived its usefulness.
How we built an auto-layout engine for StellarDeck by analyzing hundreds of real presentations, reading design theory, and letting plain markdown do the work.
How we extracted 14 JS modules and 3 CSS files from a single viewer.html in one session, keeping 174 tests green.
Hard-won lessons from building StellarDeck with Tauri 2.0: caching, ES modules, file protocols, and the gotchas nobody warns you about.
Inside the code of a personal knowledge management system that turns voice notes into blog drafts. File-based dedup, LLM-as-editor prompts, auto markers, and why the classifier needs to see everything.
While adding a museum section to this site, we learned two things the hard way: avoid chained conditionals when a lookup table will do, and check what the framework already offers before writing custom code.