Development of This Website: Technology Stack and Workflow

In this article, I describe the technology stack and development workflow I used for this website.

Hugo as Static Website Generator

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I chose Hugo because it:

• Is blazing fast - pages are generated in milliseconds
• Offers simple Markdown syntax - perfect for blog content
• Markdown files are ideal for agentic development - can be easily read and edited by AI agents
• Has a theming system - allows easy customizations
• Themes as Git submodules - can be cleanly integrated and maintained as separate Git submodules
• Provides multilingual support - ideal for my German/English website
• Requires no database - everything is static files
• Has significantly less maintenance overhead than JavaScript-based websites - no constant updates of JS/TypeScript dependencies needed

Blowfish as Hugo Theme

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For the design, I use the Blowfish theme because it:

• Offers a modern, clean design
• Is responsive - works on all devices
• Contains many shortcodes for advanced features
• Supports dark mode
• Has good documentation
• Provides very useful shortcodes such as:
  • {{< mermaid >}} for rendering Mermaid-diagrams
  • {{< codeimporter >}} for flexible code snippet embedding
  • {{< mdimporter >}} for flexible markdown snippet embedding
  • {{< video >}} for flexible video embedding (local, URL)
  • …

The theme is excellent… many thanks to Nuno Coração from Portugal.

Zed as IDE for Agentic Development

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For code editing, I use Zed, a modern IDE optimized for agentic workflows:

• Extremely fast - Based on Rust with native performance
• AI integration - Zed AI for intelligent code completion
• Agentic engineering - Support for parallel agents
• Multi-agent collaboration - Parallel working agents
• Markdown support - Built-in Markdown support for seamless Hugo integration
• CSS support - Built-in CSS support for theme customizations
• HTML support - Built-in HTML support for theme customizations
• YAML support - Built-in YAML support for GitHub CI/CD configurations
• TOML support - TOML support via extension for Hugo configurations
• Git - In addition to the excellent built-in Git support, Git Firefly provides syntax highlighting
• GitHub Actions - GitHub Actions Extension and GitHub Actions Snippets Extension make working with GitHub Actions workflows easier

Mistral AI Models

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An important part of my development workflow is using Mistral AI, particularly with the extremely cost-effective Mistral Small model:

• Extremely cost-efficient - The entire AI usage for setting up and migrating the old Astro-based website cost less than €5 (without using parallel agents and Spec-Driven Development with OpenSpec).

• Markdown-optimized - Ideal for editing Hugo content
• Agentic development - Enables automated content creation and editing
• Multilingual support - Perfect for my bilingual or multilingual content. Writing posts in the native language, automated translation into foreign languages. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) considers the topicality of the content. If content is not regularly updated or outdated content is not removed, the website’s ranking deteriorates. In this respect, AI

Depending on the prompting, models generate commit messages like the following for traceability of generated code.

Agent Prompts

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As always in agentic workflows, the right methodology is crucial: For smaller and larger changes to the website, clever prompts like the following are usually absolutely sufficient:

Agent Skill Libraries?

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As always, prompts can be made reusable with Agent Skills and shared with the community, if desired, as a Skill Library.

So far, I have not found any or any suitable open source Agent Skills libraries for me. Therefore, I have written my own Agent Skills. All Agent Skills are located in the standardized project-specific directory path <Project>/.agents/skills/. This ensures that Agent Skills work with every agent (e.g. Hermes Agent) and every IDE (not only with the Zed IDE I use).

Hugo

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Currently, there are no public Skill Libraries on GitHub for Hugo.

My Hugo-specific Agent Skills are located in <Project>/.agents/skills/hugo/.

Blowfish Theme

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Unfortunately, there is also (not yet) no skill library for the Blowfish Hugo theme.

My Blowfish-specific Agent Skills are located in <Project>/.agents/skills/hugo-blowfish/.

Website Content

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For the content aspects of the website, I have written Agent Skills for:

• Generating new German posts -> <Project>/.agents/skills/post-create
• Translating from German to other languages (currently English) -> <Project>/.agents/skills/post-translate
• Updating non-German posts based on the current state of German posts -> <Project>/.agents/skills/posts-update

Spec-Driven Development?

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I have also experimented with the Spec-Driven Development framework OpenSpec. Research (YouTube, …) shows that OpenSpec compares to other Spec-Driven Development frameworks like BMad Method (absolute overkill, compared to OpenSpec about factor 8 worse “performance” in terms of implementation time and costs) and Spec Kit (somewhat more complex and cumbersome than OpenSpec).

Using Spec-Driven Development can be interesting for larger websites. For my previous use cases, I found the overhead too large.

To ensure traceability of website changes, Spec-Driven Development is not required:

I never use model-generated commit messages (or prevent the generation by appropriate instructions in the <Project>/AGENTS.md file). Instead, I review all agentic code changes and manually create Conventional Commits or “Conventional Merge Request Squash Commits” (summary of multiple features, fixes, etc. in a commit message summarized for a merge request).

To cover the technological aspects of a website with Conventional Commits, the common types feat (new/changed/removed feature) and fix (problem resolution) are sufficient.

To cover the content aspect of a website with Conventional Commits, the extension of Conventional Commits to include the types page (new/changed/removed page) and post (new/changed/removed blog post) is required.

Perhaps I will still write an Agent Skill that prepares commit messages for me without automatically committing. So far, the manual effort has been reasonable.

GitHub for Version Control

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I use GitHub for code versioning.

Code Versioning

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The entire source code of this website is versioned on GitHub:

• Free - €0 per month for code versioning
• Complete history of all changes
• Branches for experimental features

Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD) and Hosting

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AI-optimized websites must load as fast as possible. The majority of my website visits come from countries that are not in Germany and the EU.

Therefore, I want to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)-based solution for deployment.

My previous hosting with Hetzner benefited from the world’s largest international internet hub in Frankfurt. However, Hetzner does not offer a CDN-based solution.

There are very good European providers of CDN services (e.g. bunny.net). However, they (so far) do not offer me a solution for the integration of CI, CD, and hosting with reasonable overhead.

Therefore, I have now decided to migrate CI, CD, and hosting to CloudFlare Pages.

• In my case, this is absolutely uncritical from an IT security perspective, because no secrets are needed and I consider the GitHub integration to be good (minimal data access, minimal repository interaction rights).
• From a data privacy perspective, the use is justifiable because:
  • Many other German website hosting providers (e.g. Jimbo) consciously host with CloudFlare for IT security reasons
  • And the majority of European internet users accept cookies beyond what is technologically required without hesitation.

Workflow

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1. Code is pushed to git repository. No (slow) execution of a CI pipeline is needed.
2. CloudFlare Pages automatically detects code changes via GitHub integration (regarding IT security ok).
3. CloudFlare Pages builds the production page for commits in the branch defined for production deployments. Optionally, preview deployments can be configured and used.

Benefits

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• Free - €0 per month for CI/CD
• Automatic - no manual deployment needed
• Fast - changes are online in seconds
• Reliable - fewer errors through automation
• Versioned - every deployment is related to a Git commit
• CDN-based hosting - free hosting, extremely fast website loading times worldwide

How “Good” is the Website?

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To check the optimization of websites, I currently use pagespeed.web.dev. Based on the hyperlinks on the website, the service appears to be based on Google Lighthouse.

Since Google still holds the largest market share in the search engine market, this should not be a bad choice. In particular, the analysis of agentic browsing (optimization of the website for agent-based website access) is relevant to me.

The website has a very good score and is therefore almost complete.

The current score of the website can be found here.

Recently, I discovered Cloudflare Agent Readiness (currently in beta). The AI optimization features appear to have been introduced in May 2026. The optimizations go beyond the recommendations considered by PageSpeed/Lighthouse (among others):

• Discoverability:
  • robots.txt
  • sitemap.xml
  • Link Headers (RFC 8288)
• Content:
  • Markdown for Agents
• Bot Access Control:
  • Content Signals
  • AI Bot Rules in robots.txt
  • Web Bot Auth
• Capabilities:
  • Agent Skills
  • API Catalog (RFC 9727)
  • OAuth server discovery via RFC 8414 and RFC 9728
  • MCP Server Card
  • WebMCP

The best information about compatibility (including optimization recommendations) of a website can be viewed at isitagentready.com. For static websites (like mine), Site Type = Content Site must be selected under Customize Scan.

The current score of the website can be viewed here.

Prompts for optimization, such as including (associated Agent Skill)…

Goal: Publish /robots.txt with clear crawl rules

Issue: robots.txt exists but appears invalid (no User-agent directive)

Fix: Create /robots.txt at the site root with explicit User-agent directives and allow/disallow rules for key paths. Ensure it is plain text and returns 200.

Skill: https://isitagentready.com/.well-known/agent-skills/robots-txt/SKILL.md

Docs: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9309

Additional interesting data (degree of adaptation of AI optimizations in websites, etc.) can be viewed in Cloudflare AI Insights.

Tip: The overview shown in the dashboard under Cloudflare Agent Readiness is misleading.

Conclusion

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An extremely cost-efficient, efficient, agentic web development setup

This setup allows me to focus entirely on content while the technical infrastructure runs cost-effectively, reliably, and with minimal maintenance in the background. The combination of open-source tools, AI support, and automated workflows represents a modern, forward-looking approach to web development that is ideal for both individual developers and small teams.

Technological Advantages

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• Hugo + Blowfish: Lightning-fast static page generation with professional design and Git submodule support. Minimal maintenance effort by avoiding JavaScript/TypeScript (few security updates needed) and static website (extremely small IT security attack surface).
• Zed IDE: Optimized development environment with native support for all relevant file formats (Markdown, HTML, CSS, YAML, TOML)
• Mistral AI: Cost-effective AI support for agentic workflows and content creation
• CloudFlare Pages: Good integration of CI, CD, and hosting. Extremely fast website loading times worldwide. Static website (extremely small IT security attack surface, no impact of security incidents at hoster CloudFlare on other IT infrastructure) and automated deployment. Data privacy technically justifiable.

Financial Advantages

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One-time costs:

• Under €10 AI costs for the complete migration from Astro to Hugo
• Time effort of approx. 5 hours.

Ongoing costs:

• €0/month for CI, CD, and hosting (GitHub and CloudFlare Pages are free)
• AI costs depending on mood and desire :)
• Time effort depending on mood and desire :)
• Time effort: Minimal effort by avoiding JavaScript/TypeScript (few security updates needed)

Workflow Advantages

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• Agentic development: AI agents can work directly with Markdown files
• Speed: At least 5-10x faster than without agentic workflow
• Automation: CloudFlare-based CI and CD
• Scalability: Easy extension through shortcodes and theme customizations
• Future-proof: Modern technologies with minimal dependencies