I took over the US site and web-coded it solo

The build lives on my laptop

I stood up the site's Next.js project locally and drive every change through AI-assisted web coding against a real dev server. I self-check each change visually on localhost before it leaves my machine. No front-end engineer, no Webflow.

One sentence starts a release round

Every round follows the same path: clean clone of the latest main into a new dated folder, the previous round renamed with a -published-donotuse suffix and kept on disk, edits and self-check on localhost, changelog and version bump, push and announce. Doing that by hand is twenty minutes of setup before any actual work, every single time, and it is exactly the kind of procedure a person eventually starts shortcutting.

So the SOP became an agent workflow with the procedure held in long-term memory. I say one line, that we are preparing an update, and it runs the chain: builds a clean folder, pulls the current main from GitLab, installs and prepares the local environment, applies the naming law, and carries my locally tested changes into the new merge request untouched. Two checks run inside it. One agent verifies that anything I changed in the shared global configuration cannot reach the Japanese or Korean sites. A technical-SEO agent runs new content against our own checklist. Then it uploads to GitLab, writes the changelog, and drafts the channel message.

The last step is the one that keeps it honest over time. The merge request it just pushed becomes the working base for the next round, and the previous folder is archived automatically. My local copy is therefore never more than one version behind main, which is what stops the slow drift that makes a hand-run process rot.

Pulling Japan and Korea out of our blast radius

The structural change underneath all of this was separating the global configuration. Japan and Korea sit in subfolders of the English site and inherited a large amount of shared setting, which meant the US moving quickly and those two staying stable were in direct tension. I split the shared layer so their configuration stands on its own. The skeleton and the visual system still line up across all three, deliberately, and now there is defined room inside that for each region to differ.

The reason is sequencing. The US runs as the pioneer: we build a thing, ship it, and find out where it breaks. Japan and Korea then adopt it on their own schedule rather than having it pushed onto them mid-release. When I later built the CMS, that is exactly how it went: stand it up in their environment, hand over an account, and let them adjust within their own global settings for local reading habits and visual conventions, with no risk of their changes landing on anyone else's site. It works in the other direction too, since a configuration we ship here is something they can copy, translate and localize quickly.