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FUTURESELF

Case study

John N. Fricker, Luthier Registry

My grandfather made guitars in the 1970s. This project pays tribute to the few guitars that remain.

Completed September 2026

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Impact

Instruments cataloged
2
Time to market
2 weeks
Guitars made by John N. Fricker, Luthier and registry at johnnfrickerluthier.fricker.com
Guitars made by John N. Fricker, Luthier and registry at johnnfrickerluthier.fricker.com

Problem Statement

My grandfather and grandmother made classical guitars (and lutes) in the 1970s and every once in a while I get an email from someone who owns one. They want to know what I think its worth and what its history is. So I thought it was about time to make a website for the owners of the last few instruments scattered around the country. And as a tribute to my grandparents.

It’s a very small audience but it allowed me to experiment and refine some development practices and try some different agentic design techniques.

Architecture & Technology Stack

  • Astro SSG
  • Cloudflare Pages, Image Transformations, D1 and R2 databases, Access

The site is a fully static Astro generated and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. I really prefer static websites whenever possible.

Unseen is the curator interface where queued submissions land for me to edit and approve.

Agentic Workflow Breakdown

For this project I refined my waterfallish SDLC. I wrote a fairly detailed intent.md document which turned into a spec and an implementation plan. I read and approve every step and for a small project it can still become quite involved. I used brainstorming and grill-me steps to get everything solid before turning agents loose on the plan.

Like all many engineering projects this spawned a tool I call Metaproject which I’ve developed into the keeper of my project scaffolding and templates. Since June I’ve developed over 30 projects and refined how I operate repeatedly. I’ve settled on a series of documents now so Metaproject not only helps me set up new projects but it helps to bring existing projects into conformance with my evolving process. More on that in a Lab Note.

Design

For this design I created a context for Google Gemini to use. I asked it to create three UI variations for my review and approval. Gemini (using the Antimatter harness) was very adept at UI and the three design were better than I expected. I instructed it to take the components I liked from each and give me a brand guideline. I did a few final iterations before I thought it was good. I’m still making small changes but overall I’m ok with it.

Key Learnings & Next Steps

  • Static generation is a good initial architecture: fast, flexible and easy to morph into a dynamic service if the time comes. I’ve been a fan of this approach for over 20 years and Cloudflare is made for it.

  • Google Gemini is a real contender for rapid design and iteration.