plaintextlab.com

Source for plaintextlab.com, a blog about building software with coding agents.

Stack

• Next.js with the App Router, exported as static files.
• Astryx, Meta's open-source design system, for every component and layout.
• StyleX for the site's own styles, compiled at build time.
• Vitest and Testing Library for unit tests.
• GitHub Actions builds the site and publishes it to GitHub Pages on every push to main.

Local development

Requires Node.js 22.18 or newer.

npm ci
npm run dev

The dev server runs at http://localhost:3000.

Checks

npm run check

That runs lint, typecheck and the unit tests, the same way CI does. npm run build writes the static site to out/; run it once on a fresh clone before npm run typecheck, because the build generates next-env.d.ts. Husky runs the same checks on every commit.

Publishing

Merging a pull request into main triggers deploy.yml, which builds the site and publishes out/ to GitHub Pages at plaintextlab.com. Nothing is published from a branch; pull requests only run the checks.

Working with coding agents

AGENTS.md holds the repository rules for Codex, Claude Code and other agents; CLAUDE.md points at it. The Astryx CLI is available as npm run astryx -- <command>.

License

Posts and other written content are licensed under CC BY 4.0. The site's code is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for both.