Assembling the first version

Filed under achievements, with an honest caveat: this is a milestone in progress, not a finished launch. The first version of the garden is being assembled right now, and I’m recording the state of it here rather than waiting for a tidy ribbon-cutting.

What’s actually done

Two foundations are built and tested. The project is scaffolded on Vite, React 19 and Tailwind v4 with the design tokens in place, and the A content compiler that runs at build time is written and covered by a unit-test suite — it’s the thing turning these very notes into the pages you’re reading. Getting the pipeline correct first, before any of the reading interface, was the deliberate order.

What’s still in progress

The reading interface — the garden listing, the note page, backlinks and the evolution timeline.
The “Now” dashboard that surfaces current focus.
The Reaching for React Three Fiber for a knowledge graph, which is still just a seed.
Deployment. The site is not live yet — that step comes last, and I’m not going to claim it before it’s true.

It’s live. The garden deployed to Vercel from this repository, and the last item above is now done — so this note gets the curated update it promised itself.

Two things surprised me on the way out the door. First, the app and its own build output were quietly fighting over the same URLs, which only showed up when I served the built site the way the host would; I wrote that up in What deploying my garden taught me about routing. Second, my commits were authored with the wrong email, which resolves to a different account on GitHub, and the host refused to build anything it attributed to a stranger. Both failures had the same shape: something that had been true on my machine all along stopped being true the moment a second system had an opinion.

Why it counts anyway

An achievements lens that only admits finished, gift-wrapped things would be dishonest about how work actually happens. Reaching a green build with a real content pipeline is a genuine milestone, so it goes here — and when the site does go live, this note will earn a curated update marking the moment. The approach that got it this far is written up in Spec-driven development with OpenSpec and AI agents, and the project it belongs to is This garden, and how it’s built.