This site is the first project I'm writing about here — and it felt right to start by talking about how it was built, because the how is kind of the whole point.
Built with AI dev tools
I built this blog using AI Dev Tools and they handled far more than I expected. Not just code completion, but the full loop: scaffolding the Next.js project, designing the layout, writing components, setting up the deployment pipeline, and configuring Cloud Run. I described what I wanted, it built it, I gave feedback, it iterated.
The experience was fast in a way that felt qualitatively different from the usual dev workflow. Ideas went from "what if we..." to running in the browser in minutes, not hours.
The stack
The blog is built with Next.js 16 and Tailwind CSS v4, with posts written in Markdown. The design is intentionally minimal: a clean reading experience, per-post accent colors, and a homepage that gets out of its own way.
Hosting on Cloud Run
Rather than reaching for a managed hosting platform, I deployed this on Google Cloud Run — also set up entirely through the tools. Here's how it works:
- Next.js builds to a standalone output — a self-contained Node.js server with only the files it needs
- That gets packaged into a Docker image and pushed to Artifact Registry
- Cloud Run pulls the image and serves it — scaling to zero when there's no traffic, so the cost for a personal blog is effectively $0
Every push to main on GitHub triggers a build and deploy automatically via GitHub Actions, using Workload Identity Federation so there are no long-lived credentials stored anywhere.
The WIF setup had a few rough edges due to my lack of attention to detail — IAM bindings that needed the right project number format. Cloud Assist in the Google Cloud Console was genuinely useful here: I pasted the error messages and it pointed me to exactly what was misconfigured. A good reminder that the AI tooling baked into the platform itself is worth reaching for, not just the third-party tools.
Custom domain with Cloud Run domain mapping
The site lives at amandalewis.dev, pointed here using Cloud Run domain mapping. Cloud Run handles SSL certificate provisioning automatically — I just set the DNS records and it sorted itself out. No load balancer needed, no certificate management, no fuss.
Why write here?
I spend a lot of time experimenting — with tools, models, workflows, ideas. Most of that thinking currently lives in notes, threads, and the occasional very long voice memo to myself.
This blog is where I'm going to start putting that thinking somewhere it can be useful to others. Learnings from building with AI tools. Experimentations that went sideways (and what I figured out from them). Iterations on ideas that took a few tries to get right. And the occasional aha moment worth writing down before it evaporates.
No strict schedule. No strict theme. Just the stuff I find interesting, hopefully others will as well.
More soon.