What we removed

The site you are reading replaced one that had been up for about a year. Rather than write about what the new one does, it is more useful to write down what was taken out, because the removals are the argument.

The headline was made of adjectives

The old homepage said Transform request to action, in a pink-to-orange gradient with a glow behind it, above a rotating list of verbs. Further down it asked Ready to Transform Your Business? and offered 24/7 AI support · 14-day free trial · No credit card required.

Not one of those claims is checkable. That is the problem with them, and it is not a problem of taste. Any language model will write that paragraph for free, in any voice you ask for, about any company. A sentence that a machine can generate on demand carries no information about whether the thing behind it is real.

So the rule for the new site is that the primary content has to be facts that would be false if we stopped doing the work. The register on the homepage is the whole idea: what exists, when it started, when it last moved. Those columns cannot be written by a copywriter, and they go stale in public if the work stops.

There is no uptime column, because nothing here is monitored yet. That felt worth leaving out rather than filling in.

The site refused to load on a phone

There was a component called ScreenSizeGuard. Below 768 pixels it covered the page with a modal that said Better Experience Awaits and asked you to come back on a desktop.

It had a Continue Anyway button. The cookie banner rendered on top of it and covered that button. So on a phone the site was not merely discouraging, it was unusable, and it had been that way for every mobile visitor for a year.

That is deleted. Nothing replaced it.

The one genuinely useful page was invisible

The old site had an agent directory — a page per integration, describing what an assistant could do with Jira or Confluence or GitHub. The Jira page carried four hundred words of specific, accurate detail. It was the best content on the site.

It was fetched from a CMS in the browser. Which means this was what a crawler received:

$ curl -s https://devclusterai.com/agent-dictionary/ | grep -io "jira\|loading"
Loading

No major AI crawler runs JavaScript. GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and CCBot each make one request, read the HTML that comes back, and leave. So the index was blank to all of them — and because the index was the only thing linking to the detail pages, those pages had no inbound links at all. They were orphans. Every page also shipped the same <title>DevCluster AI</title>, so even where they were found, there was nothing to tell them apart.

The product those pages documented is no longer running, so they are gone rather than fixed. But the lesson survives the product: content that only exists after JavaScript runs does not exist.

Three fonts, none of them from a CDN

The old stylesheet opened with three @import calls to Google Fonts. That is a render-blocking dependency on somebody else's uptime, and it hands every visitor's IP address to a third party before a single word appears.

The site uses Archivo, Bodoni Moda and Martian Mono — self-hosted variable faces, subset to latin, 170 KB for the three of them. They were chosen because they belong to the subject: Archivo is a grotesque that holds its shape when it is set very large and very tight, Martian Mono gives the 8px labels the even colour that lettering on a technical drawing has, and Bodoni carries the numerals, which is the one place a serif earns its way onto the sheet.

Revised 20.08.26. When this was published the site used Nimbus Sans Narrow, Century Schoolbook and Hack. The micrographics redraw on 19.08.26 replaced all three, and this paragraph went on naming the old ones for a day — which is exactly the failure the rest of this post is about. Corrected rather than quietly deleted, because a register that edits its own history is not a register.

What is left

Four projects, one of them public, a small team, and a changelog. That is a smaller claim than the old site made. It has the advantage of being true, and of getting less true if we stop.