Migrating from Gatsby 2 to Astro

This site was originally built on Gatsby 2 with theme-ui, and it served me well for years. But the ecosystem moved on, and maintaining a Gatsby 2 stack became less pleasant: slower builds, heavier runtime, and a lot of complexity for a mostly static site.

So this weekend I (well, mostly my AI agent) migrated the whole thing to Astro.

High-level summary of what changed:

• Static-site core:
  • Astro handles the same role Gatsby did: generating static HTML from templates and content, but with a simpler, more direct model and faster builds.
• Content:
  • Markdown posts and notes are now managed via Astro Content Collections with Zod-based schemas, instead of Gatsby’s GraphQL layer.
  • This removes the need for graphql queries everywhere and makes the content pipeline easier to reason about.
• UI layer:
  • Replaced theme-ui with plain CSS variables. The visual design is preserved, but without the extra abstraction.
  • Interactive bits (like the dynamic “years since” on my resume ) are handled by small React islands via @astrojs/react, instead of full-page hydration.
• Routing:
  • Astro’s file-based routing replaced Gatsby’s pages directory and createPages. Dynamic routes (blog posts, notes) are generated via getStaticPaths.

AI agent stack used:

• Local llama.cpp-tq3 running on nVidia GeForce RTX 4090 (when possible, I run AI inference at home - no paying for tokens, only electricity!)
• Qwen3.6-27B-NEO-CODE-HERE-2T-OT-Q4_K_M.gguf model quant with its corresponding mmproj-BF16.gguf for machine vision, running with 196608 context size
• Hermes-agent harness

The result:

• Same content, same look and feel.
• No more GraphQL.
• Faster builds, smaller JS footprint, and a modern 2026 stack

If you are reading this and nothing looks broken, the migration worked.