Notes from the studio
Essays, case-study deep-dives, and field notes from building websites and AI tools at Rough Works.
7 engineering problems AI design tools didn't solve for us
Building a roguelike RPG demands scaling, narrative, performance, and procedural rendering at once. See how Rough Works leveraged AI design tools in Berner Crawl.
OLVR ring scroll: Rolex 3D via Shopify custom development
Rolex uses WebGL for scroll-rotating watches. Our Shopify custom development for OLVR used 360 pre-rendered frames: better fidelity, lower cost, 95+ Lighthouse.
4 Awwwards 2026 lessons for brand identity design briefs
Bruno Simon's WebGPU portfolio, UNESCO's stolen artifacts museum, 100 Lost Species, Farm Minerals: four case studies on brand identity design in 2026.
Claude Design walkthrough: great tool, not a designer
Anthropic's Claude Design is the best design-to-code tool yet, but this Claude Design walkthrough shows why a real designer still matters for great work.
Claude Code 2026: AI website development from the CLI
Opus 4.7, Claude Design, Stainless, KPMG at 276,000 seats: Anthropic moves fast. The state of play, and where an agency adds leverage in AI website development.
The SEO strategy that ranks: topic clusters for 2026
Most agencies preach SEO silos and topic clusters without shipping the internal-linking SEO strategy behind them. Here's our system, plus the audit tool.
AI website maintenance: a daily SEO audit agent
A scheduled GitHub Actions workflow for AI website maintenance: it scans every blog post, classifies it into a content silo, scores SEO health, and reports findings.
Edge security hosting for WordPress in 2026: real setup
WordPress is the web's most-attacked CMS. Cloudflare's free WAF and edge security hosting cut the noise—here's the exact rule set we run, and why each exists.
Headless WordPress development with Claude API: 2026
WordPress as the CMS, a static front-end as the public site, and Claude API quietly handling editorial work between them. Our go-to WordPress development pattern.
Why we rebuilt roughworks.ca as an AI-enhanced website
Our agency site ran on WordPress and a page builder. It worked. We swapped it for a static, AI-enhanced website anyway. Here's what changed and why it took a day.
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