Riley Sklar / Blog
Writing. Notes on building, designing and shipping.
Notes on what I'm learning, building, and thinking about as a developer and designer.
15 posts
Oct 27, 2026
Documentation as a System, Not a Project
Product docs, screenshots and demo clips go stale the week after launch. Here is how we turned keeping them current into a re-run, and what that gives product marketing.
Swip ToolsDocumentationAutomation
Oct 13, 2026
A Design System That Reads Itself From the Stylesheet
I published this site's design system as a live page where the tokens are parsed from the CSS and every component renders from its real source, so the docs can't drift. Here's how it's put together.
Design SystemAstroTailwind
Oct 13, 2026
My Reading List: A War, a Metal Band, a Startup and a Shipwreck
A Spanish Civil War travelogue, a heavy metal Cold War novel, a book about startup founders, and Shackleton's Antarctic survival story. None of them are about my job, but they're all connected, and there's a lot in them I can apply to it.
BooksLeadershipStartups
Oct 12, 2026
What the Mario Clone Made Me Take Seriously
An LLM built me a Mario clone, and it was stronger than I expected. It was built from everyone's knowledge, so I think the most capable systems should be regulated and, in the end, publicly owned by all people.
AIPolicySociety
Oct 11, 2026
I Cloned Mario With an LLM, and It Surprised Me
I asked an LLM for a Super Mario clone, then gave it a story loosely based on a book about the Spanish Civil War. It was more powerful than I expected. Here is what came back.
AIClaude CodeGames
Oct 3, 2026
Where Your Machine Is Really Waiting
Every time a factory switches a machine from one product to the next, it stops making things. We built a free tool at Swip Tools that shows how much of that time you can win back.
ManufacturingLeanSwip Tools
Oct 2, 2026
Four Stopwatch Times, One Fair Number
How long should a task on the factory floor take? We built a free tool at Swip Tools that turns a few stopwatch timings into one fair number, and shows whether the whole job keeps up with demand.
ManufacturingLeanSwip Tools
May 27, 2026
Humans First in the AI Era
Zack Exley's "Why Capitalism Can't Survive AI" names the macroeconomic crisis. Underneath it is a quieter question about what the AI era is doing to people — and a set of design choices being made about humanity right now.
AIHumanityEthics
May 25, 2026
From DALL-E 3 to gpt-image-1: A Python Batch Script for Blog Headers
How I built a small Python tool to batch-generate topic-tailored blog header images via OpenAI's gpt-image-1, compress them to WebP, and rewrite Astro frontmatter — for ~$1 total.
OpenAIgpt-image-1Python