Building Press

How I built Press, the editorial engine that writes from my work. One boundary of the system per part.

Building Press, Part 1: Read the work, leave the secrets

How confidentiality at egress keeps Press ingestion safe by redacting secrets before anything leaves the machine.

Building Press, Part 2: The data model is the spine

Why Press keeps signals, stories, and posts as distinct tables, and why a post's body lives on a revision, not the post row.

Building Press, Part 3: The prompts are data, not code

Why Press treats prompts as config so each model stage can improve quickly without waiting on a deploy.

Building Press, Part 4: Review is where the human gates the irreversible

How human in the loop publishing keeps Press safer with deterministic blocks, SEO checks, and human approval before posts go live.

Building Press, Part 5: A static export that reads a database

A static export from a database can be fast, but only if the edge actually caches it. Here is what Press learned from Cloudflare.

Building Press, Part 6: The datacenter can't post, so the laptop does

Automating social posting in Press means queueing in Studio, then posting from a residential worker with a legitimate browser session.