intrebit.com

This is our own website, built the way we build for clients and looked after the same way. It's also the one place we can try something without asking anyone first, so it changes in bursts, with weeks of quiet and then a day when everything moves.

The first change went in at the end of November 2025, with the message “First commit.” The second, a month later, said “Some changes, idk tbh.” Over a thousand changes later, most of what we wrote along the way has been deleted again.

Most of the code was written with AI. I steered it, read it and sent a lot of it back, and most of my time went into polishing out what makes a site look machine-made. The labels it put over every heading, for one, all came off.

I couldn't have built it all by hand while also running the company. The accounts, the tax and the client work happen in the same weeks as this site, so AI writes the first draft of the code and I decide what stays.

The words got more rework than the code. The file that holds every sentence on the site has changed more often than any other.

When it rains in Dublin, the site knows. It reads the city's forecast, and when that says rain, faint rain falls over the page. Around Halloween a ghost drifts across the page, and the rest of the year it doesn't.

Light or dark follows your device until you pick one. The effects switch turns the moving parts off, and the rain stays still if your device asks for less motion.

Very little of it belongs to anyone else. Visits and the contact form go to Dullahan, our own server, which counts without cookies, so there's no banner to click through. Leixlip Dog Grooming's site is built the same way, so what we try here ends up in client work.

Before anything goes live, the site checks itself. If a page still has a gap where the words should be, it doesn't ship. There are a few things to find, too. Start with the browser console.

The code for this site is public, so you can read how all of this is built.

It's built with Astro, and has been since the first commit, through two major upgrades. We picked it because it's fast. Pages go out as plain HTML. The one script Astro adds is its page router, so moving from page to page never reloads one; the other few small scripts here are ones we wrote on purpose. It's also what we build client sites with.

It runs on Cloudflare Workers. Most pages are built ahead of time. Only the blog, an admin area and a few small endpoints (the visit beacon, the weather, the season) run code on each request, and they live in the same project rather than on a separate server.

The weather endpoint reads MET Norway's forecast for Dublin, never the visitor's location, and the season endpoint checks today's date in Dublin against a short list. The rain and the ghost wait until the page is idle, and neither runs with effects off.

The home page is tiny once compressed, with its styles inlined. The font comes from our own domain rather than a font service, and every script on the page is our own, apart from Astro's router.

The page sends a small beacon to our own domain, which passes it on to Dullahan. Dullahan turns your IP address and browser into a salted hash, and the salt changes every day, so it can count visitors without knowing who they are. The IP address itself is never stored. It honours Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control, and it sets no cookies.

The contact form posts straight to Dullahan, which keeps the message and emails it to us. The blog lives in the site's own code: a post is a file, so writing one is a change we can review like any other.

Every response carries security headers and a content security policy. Each page has structured data, the sitemap takes its dates from the code's history, and an llms.txt file describes the studio for AI assistants. Share images are drawn when the site is built.

The deploy refuses to run while any page still has a placeholder in its copy. Separate checks read every page for its title, structured data and sitemap entry, and open every page in a real browser, light and dark, desktop and phone, failing any page where two links say the same thing. Google's page speed test gives it full marks for accessibility, best practices and SEO, and near-full marks for performance.

From the history, as of 18 October 2026: 1,133 commits since 30 November 2025, on only 50 different days. The busiest was 8 October 2026, with 216. There were four breaks of over a month, and only one commit ever went in after midnight. About 76,000 lines written and 58,000 deleted, so roughly three in four didn't survive. 526 files created, 330 deleted, 210 left. The file with the site's words in it has changed over 250 times, more than any other. Commit messages worth keeping: “MOAR STYLEZ.”, “I remembered why I hate frontend. Still not done.” and “Clean code and that stuff nobody cares about.”