the sketchbook
Three drawers: how the system gets built, the new CSS found along the way, and where AI meets stylesheets. New posts when there's something worth saying.
Post-mortems and build stories from the repo — published only after the fix ships.
engineering6 min
cia's pages turn into real printed documents — cover, table index, numbered sheets, followable links — with zero JavaScript and no PDF library. The generator was in the browser the whole time; we only had to ship the styling layer, and each honest-looking feature hid a smaller, sharper bug than we expected.
engineering4 min
A zero-JS tabs component shipped with a one-element off-by-one that CSS can't even express a fix for — and the only reason we found it was converting the docs to live demos. A post-mortem, plus everything else that changed in one very long day.
engineering5 min
Sass does not read package.json exports. Both documented imports failed on a clean install, and every check we had stayed green.
architecture7 min
Next.js CSS Modules reject a top-level :root, so cia's authoring entry point had to print zero bytes until a mixin is called. Here is how, and what it cost.
engineering8 min
Agents guess at mixin signatures because prose docs give them nothing to query. cia ships a stdio MCP server that reads the SCSS instead. What broke along the way.
engineering8 min
We cut 1.0 on 2026-08-17 with 24 of 42 planned stories done and an entire epic unstarted. Here is the reasoning, and what actually changed.
technique8 min
The browser already ships a PDF generator. cia's print layer is four mixins, three CSS variables, and no JavaScript at all.
architecture6 min
cia ships markdown patterns instead of a component library. Here is what that buys you, and the bug fix you give up to get it.
engineering7 min
Seven themes scored 0 of 17 contrast pairs and the validator still printed a green check. A post-mortem on 119 silent skips and the parser that caused them.
technique6 min
npx cia migrate reads your Tailwind config or Bootstrap variables and writes a cia theme.scss, with a confidence rating on every token it maps.
New and cool CSS from the platform's edge — the discovery is the star; cia is the sponsor.
discovery4 min
anchor-name, three inset lines, and position-try-fallbacks replace the positioning half of a dropdown library — trigger-width menus that flip above the trigger when the viewport would clip them, re-evaluated by the browser on every open.
discovery4 min
Half of what makes [popover] work is user-agent CSS you can silently destroy with one innocent declaration. Three ways we broke it — a permanently open menu, a menu that refused to be full-width, and the inset trick that un-centers the overlay.
discovery4 min
nth-of-type counts element types, not classes — and the selector everyone assumes exists, :nth-of-class, never has. How one same-type sibling shifts every index by one, why the bug looks wired while being broken, and the modern selector that finally fixes it.