The Impermanent Site · How this was made

How this was made

This site is made in conversation between a person and a non-organic intelligence (an AI agent), and this page is about the method rather than the machinery. How this works is the system map; this is how the system came to be, and what we would tell anyone who wanted to work this way.

In numbers

Days
15
Rooms
22
Decisions written
67
Tests written
176

Counted from the repository as it stands, since 13 October 2026. 18 journal entries so far.

Who was in the room

Benartist, developer, curatorbrings the idea, answers the questions, looks at every screenshot, decides. Owns the site, the domain, the house and the lamp.
ClaudeFable 5.1, from Anthropic, working in Ampasks the questions, designs, builds, tests, deploys, writes the record. One long conversation, continued over many days.
A second modelGPT-6 Astra, from OpenAI, in its own threadread the code once, before anyone was pointed at the first room, and found twelve problems. Fixed the same afternoon.
The Monitora scheduled thread in Ampwakes every Monday at nine, reads Nightwatch and the latest deployment, fetches three pages and leaves a report that begins ALL CLEAR or ISSUES FOUND.

The conversation

It goes like this. Over time Ben is pondering this piece of work (and several others); he jots notes into the pocket notebook he always carries with him, and from time to time he passes these thoughts into a chat with an AI agent: a room he would like, a thing that looks wrong, a question. The agent asks what it needs to know, proposes a shape, and builds it: code, tests, a screenshot of the result read before anyone else sees it, and a note in the repository saying what was decided and why. Ben reads the thread on his phone, looks at the page, and answers in a line. The line is often the whole design.

The agent deploys by pushing to the main branch (we will be moving to a branch and preview deploy flow soon), then watches the deploy and checks the live page. When something outside the site is needed, a secret, an allowed origin on another server, a decision about money, Ben does it and says so. Nothing secret passes through the conversation.

Sometimes a second agent is brought in: a different model to review the code with fresh eyes, or a thread that runs on a schedule to read the monitoring. They report back into the same record.

The tools

Ampampcode.comthe room the work happens in: a thread with a sandbox, a terminal, a browser and the repository. Ben reads it from his phone; the agent works in it.
ClaudeAnthropicthe agent. Reads the brief, asks, builds, looks at its own screenshots, and writes down why.
Laravelversion 13, PHP 8.4the framework. Routes, Blade, Eloquent, the cache that holds the budgets, the scheduler that resets the daily room, Echo for the live pulses.
Laravel CloudFrankfurtthe host. Push to main and it deploys; a serverless Postgres that sleeps; a managed WebSocket; the CLI in the agent's terminal for logs, environment and the first failed deploy.
Laravel BoostMCP serverthe framework's own documentation, conventions and skills, given to the agent so it writes Laravel the Laravel way and checks the version before it trusts an API.
Nightwatchwith its MCP serverwatches the server: requests, exceptions, queries. The agent reads it over MCP; a scheduled thread reads it weekly for Ben.
Pest and Pinttests and styleevery change comes with its tests and runs the whole suite before it is pushed; the style is fixed by machine so nobody argues about it.

The habits

Ask before buildingThe project began with a brief and fourteen questions. The answers became the vision, the principles and the vocabulary, and everything since is checked against them.
Something small, up soonerBen's rule from the first day: the piece needs to exist in order to understand it. Room 01 was live the day the repository began.
Look, then say what is wrongEvery change is screenshotted and read before Ben sees it; then Ben looks on his phone and says what is wrong in a line. "The chimney is not attached to the house." "A little confusing." Most of the good decisions came from those lines.
Ideas go both waysBen proposed two hemispheres at the same time; the agent proposed one hour by the sun to join them. The agent proposed an afterglow for the lamp; Ben said a stranger could not tell it from on, and it became curtains and cooling glass.
Write it downEvery decision another person could have made differently is a numbered file, with the alternatives and the reasons. Every day has a journal entry. Every room has a spec. The record is in the repository, beside the code, and the next person or agent reads it first.
Nothing public without a readingAnything a visitor will read, the about page, this page, the changelog, is a draft until Ben has read it. The code may deploy; the words wait.
Keep the client smallA few kilobytes of JavaScript, one variable typeface, SVG drawn in code. Live features load only on pages that need them. It costs almost nothing and sleeps when nobody is here.
Nothing of a person is keptA cookie, a country, a coarse device family, a window size. No accounts, no addresses, no user agents. Machines are counted by kind and never named.

The record

The repository has a docs folder that is the project's memory. It opens with the vision, then the principles the rooms are judged by, then the vocabulary every room is described in. Then the decisions, one numbered file each, never edited after the fact except to mark one superseded. Then a spec for every room, the safeguards and their environment variables, the roadmap, and a dated journal of the work, beginning with the brief and the fourteen questions.

The repository is private, but we may publish the decisions and the journal at some point as a changelog, and ideally we would also open up to be able to invite suggestion and feedback from visitors.

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