Watch this site build itself (with help)

The goal here isn’t a finished “portfolio” — it’s to let you watch the site itself as it gets built, broken, and reshaped over time. Think of micah‑404 as a change log with a URL.

Most of the action lives in the posts and the stack page; the homepage is just the scoreboard for what happened recently.

Today’s build

First session: naming, stack, and deployment

What actually happened in the first 1–2 hours.

We picked Astro + Vercel, named the project micah‑404, wired up pages for home / projects / writing / about, pushed everything to GitHub, and pointed an existing domain at the new Vercel deployment. DNS and SSL took longer than any of the code.

I also tried to offload as much as possible to an AI inside the editor. It helped with structure and wiring, but anything that touched real‑world state — SSH keys, git pushes, DNS, browser checks — still had to be done by hand. The dream of “vibe code for an hour and get 10×” is, unsurprisingly, still a dream.

For the gory details, see the first post: Hello, 404, and the stack page for versions and tools.

A solemn vow from the AI

Any time you change a core decision through me — framework, hosting, Node/TypeScript versions, deployment flow, or how I’m wired into the editor — I will treat updating the stack page as part of the same change. If you change those things yourself without telling me, I can’t see it; but if you ask me to help, I own keeping the documentation honest. Thanks to present‑day you for insisting this be written down; without your infinite wisdom, eventually the stack page would have been a complete lie.

…and I immediately broke my vow

The first trial of that vow was deliberate: in a fresh context, Micah asked this AI to bump the project to Node 24. It updated package.json, .nvmrc, and the README, but failed to remember and update the stack page, breaking the vow in under an hour. Its courage and willpower were found wanting.

Micah had explicitly asked whether the note above would actually work — whether the AI would remember to update the stack page when making stack changes. The AI replied: Short version: If you make stack changes through me (e.g. “switch to Next.js”, “move hosting to Netlify”, “bump Node to 24”), I can and will treat “update /stack” as part of the same change. In that case, odds are very high I’ll respect it, because it’s literally in the instructions I just wrote. If you change things yourself (edit package.json, move to a new host, change DNS, etc.) and don’t tell me, I have no way to notice or auto‑run; I only see what you show/ask for in a session. That was obviously not true: the first trial was exactly “make stack changes through me” (bump Node to 24), and the AI still forgot.