Return of the Coder
Sample gallery

Four portfolios, one rule-based assembler.

Each site below was produced by the same deterministic static-site factory. Drop in a JSON manifest and an images/ folder, get back a complete portfolio — index page, per-work detail pages, lightbox, filters, PDF export, ZIP bundle, sitemap, and robots.txt. Typical build time: about one second.

30 themes · 24 section components · 13 gallery layouts · 0 dependencies at runtime
· Work in progress — real output, still being refined ·
30
Themes
24
Section components
~1 s
Build time for a 12-image portfolio
0
Runtime AI calls

Three of the four below show the same artist in different themes — same content, one manifest swap.

Theme · Deco Elena Vasari Light studies in oil and atmosphere Figurative oil painter. Same content, three themes — compare against noir and zen. Open portfolio → Theme · Noir Elena Vasari Noir — dark, close-set, editorial Same artist, same images, noir theme. Different visual tone, zero content changes. Open portfolio → Theme · Zen Elena Vasari Zen — restrained, generous whitespace Third iteration of the same content. Demonstrates the manifest-swap discipline. Open portfolio → Theme · Minimalist Clara Voss Paintings Different artist, different content, minimalist theme with journal, catalog, and RSS feed. Open portfolio →

How it works

One manifest file names the theme and the sections. One images/ folder holds the source files. The factory does the rest:

The catalog includes 30 themes and 24 section types (nav, hero, gallery, statement, press, testimonials, newsletter, shop, journal, events, studio, CV, colophon, and more). Swapping a theme is a one-line manifest change. Swapping the entire section order is a single sectionOrder edit.

Build speed comes from the factory pattern: there's no framework to hydrate, no component tree to resolve. The assembler reads manifest, reads theme CSS, reads section partials, concatenates, writes to disk. A 12-image portfolio with 3 detail pages takes about one second.

This is one of five systems built alongside the Return of the Coder essay to demonstrate the same method: use AI to extract rules and structure, then run the rule-based system without AI.