P.01 — Product · Media · Full-Stack
9to5AI
An independent AI news publication for developers: what shipped, what it costs and whether it matters, with every claim sourced. Run from its own newsroom CMS.
- Role
- Founder · Product, design, architecture, engineering
- Year
- 2026
- Company
- 9to5AI
01 — Overview
Overview
9to5AI is an independent news publication for developers and tech-savvy readers who want to keep up with AI without the hype. Every week a dozen new models, coding agents, pricing changes and regulations land; 9to5AI turns each one into a clear, sourced answer to three questions: what shipped, what it costs, and whether it matters for you.
It publishes fast news, explainers, hands-on guides, comparison pages with a “last checked” date, benchmark round-ups credited to the people who ran the tests, topic hubs and a weekly email digest, The Week in AI. Every claim links to its source, and there is no sponsored spin.
My own publication: I designed the product and its editorial identity, set the architecture and built the public site and the newsroom CMS behind it.
02 — The problem
Most AI coverage is either breathless or buried in vendor marketing.
Developers need news they can act on: sourced, dated and comparable. A publication that earns that trust needs newsroom-grade editorial tooling, fast and calm reading pages, and a strong presence in search.
03 — How it works
One app, two halves
A static-first public site and a full CMS in one Next.js codebase, with auth, storage and email each behind a small adapter.
- 01
Write
Rich-text editor, media library and scheduling in the admin CMS.
- 02
Curate
Homepage curation, comment moderation and newsletter sending.
- 03
Publish
Only the pages a story touches are refreshed; the rest stay pre-built.
- 04
Serve
Every public page is pre-built and served from the CDN, so readers never wait on the database.
- 05
Discover
Sitemaps (including Google News), RSS, structured data, IndexNow pings and permanent links.
- 06
Maintain
A nightly SEO crawl, and routine cleanup as a one-click action in the dashboard.
04 — Features
What's inside.
01Editorial design
Print-inspired: warm paper and ink colours, Instrument Serif headlines with IBM Plex for the interface, halftone art and a textured 9to5AI wordmark, in light and dark modes. Readability comes first.
02Story formats
News, explainers, hands-on guides, comparison pages with a “last checked” date, credited benchmark round-ups and topic hubs that gather each company's or product's story on one page.
03Newsroom CMS
Rich-text editor, homepage curation, media library, scheduling, comment moderation, the weekly newsletter, SEO health checks, redirects and analytics: everything needed to publish like a newsroom.
04Swappable services
Auth, storage and email each sit behind a small adapter. The whole project runs offline on a laptop (local Postgres, local files, emails logged to the console) and switches to Supabase, R2 and Resend through environment variables.
05Media pipeline
Uploads go straight from the browser to Cloudflare R2, and sharp generates the image variants.
06Security
Cloudflare Turnstile, rate limiting, strict Content Security Policy headers, and a locked-down admin with authenticator-app sign-in.
05 — My contribution
Team, and what was mine.
Team
- Founder-led publication: product, editorial design and engineering built in-house
My contribution
- Product, editorial and interface design
- Architecture: static-first pages, targeted refresh on publish and swappable service adapters
- Full-stack build of the public site and the admin CMS
- Search, performance and security
- Unit and end-to-end tests, deployment and scheduled jobs
06 — Technical depth
What it's built with, layer by layer.
- Frontend
- Next.js 16 (App Router, Server Components) · TypeScript (strict) · Hand-written CSS with design tokens · next/font
- Backend
- Server actions & API routes · Drizzle ORM · PostgreSQL
- Database & auth
- Supabase (Postgres, authenticator-app sign-in for the admin)
- Storage & media
- Cloudflare R2 · sharp
- Resend
- Security
- Cloudflare Turnstile · Rate limiting · Strict CSP headers
- Deployment
- Vercel · Cloudflare DNS · GitHub Actions
- Testing
- Vitest · Playwright
07 — Gallery
In pictures.
08 — Outcome
Where it landed.
<1.8s
LCP target
on mobile
0
Layout shift
pages are built not to move while loading
7
Content formats
from fast news to the weekly digest
Live at 9to5ai.tech: a content-led publication built to grow through search, newsletter subscribers and returning readers, with room to monetise through sponsorships, a premium newsletter or developer-tool partnerships.
Every public page is pre-built and served from the CDN, and the CMS covers the whole editorial workflow, from draft to newsletter. The screenshots here are from the local build, with sample stories.