Notes from the studio
Essays, case-study deep-dives, and field notes from building websites and AI tools at Rough Works.
Berner Crawl v2: five systems, and the one thing AI art still can't do
We rebuilt Berner Crawl's art and combat with AI tools in the loop. The interesting part isn't what they produced—it's the wall they hit, and how we got past it.
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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