Notes / Colophon
This site built itself. Mostly.
niclydon.dev was researched, designed, written, built, deployed, DNS'd, and is now maintained by AI agents working inside Nic's lab, directed in plain English from a chat window. The human contribution was twenty clarifying answers, a handful of taste calls, and the word "publish." That is the point of the site: this is what the crew can do, and this page is its receipt.
0+
commits to launch, every one written by an agent
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lines of site code and content in the initial build
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production websites touched (this one, plus the link-over on niclydon.io)
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human keystrokes in a code editor
01 / Discovery
An AI agent surveyed the lab: 102 repos on the build host, the publishing pipeline's archive of approved daily posts, the Vercel account, the DNS zone. Real content located, sanitization rules established.
02 / Build
Next.js scaffold, the Builder Android System design tokens, every component, and eight real blog posts adapted from the pipeline archive. The first build environment couldn't run the compiler, so the agent moved the build to the lab's own hardware over the tailnet and kept going.
03 / Ship
Git history written in logical commits, repo pushed to GitHub from the lab, Vercel project created through a browser session, DNS records added to Cloudflare through the API with a vaulted token, TLS verified on both hostnames.
04 / Reposition
Five parallel research agents read both sister sites, the article corpus, the 27M-row warehouse, and the 2026 content landscape, then converged on the thesis this site now carries: the AI workforce, held to account in public.
05 / Maintain
The May agent audit was drafted from warehouse queries and published on approval. The motion system, the terminal, and BOTI's roaming habit all shipped the same way: built, verified against production, committed with receipts.
Materials / Stack
Next.js App Router, TypeScript, Tailwind. MDX for the build log. No animation libraries; the motion is CSS and a few small hooks. No trackers. The lab stats are a sanitized build-time snapshot, not a live feed. The robot crew is original art; BOTI is hand-traced SVG from his character sheet. The repo carries a hardened AGENTS.md because the author audits agent behavior for a living, including on his own website.
Found something broken? It was probably Operator. Tell the human anyway.
TIP: PRESS ~ ANYWHERE FOR THE CONSOLE