Pietro Rea
After 8 years of Gatsby.js, I built my own static site generator
March 31, 2026Finally, with the help of AI, I have moved my blog off of Gatsby.js and onto what I’ve long known should be its final state: a custom Typescript script that builds a static site from a headless WordPress instance (source code here).
After only a couple of hours of work (and 50% of my paid Cursor allotment this month), I’ve done what I’ve long wanted to do for years and years: rip out Gatsby, and with it, my static blog’s inexplicable dependence on React and GraphQL. I also rewrote everything in Typescript (from JavaScript) and added over a hundred tests that run on every PR.
Did I vibe code it? It’s hard to tell. I certainly didn’t read through every single test but I understand everything it’s doing because I was very opinionated and direct. The trickiest part was getting the build script to download each blog post’s embedded images and include them in the static bundle. There were also a couple of other features that I used to get for free from Gatsby, such as RSS feed and sitemap generation, that I had to recreate in the build script.
To make sure the end result worked well, I reviewed every blog post on this site. This 2023 blog post, in which I describe Meadow’s roll out of Copilot for Business, is quaint in 2026. AI autocomplete and GitHub Copilot were good introductions to AI workflows, but neither of them come close to what we have today.
The fact that I was able to fix something that was bothering me for almost a decade in a few hours is deeply meaningful. Right now the discussion is mostly about increased productivity, smaller teams and AI displacing labor.
We’re not paying enough attention to all the software that’s about to be written that was simply implausible to write before. Every itch will be scratched. Every underserved need and niche should be and will be revisited in the coming years.
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