hotrod

What it is

hotrod is an Astro 6 starter built for sites that a coding agent will build and maintain. The conventions, file layout, and content schema are arranged so Claude Code, Cursor, or any other coding agent can ship pages, posts, and updates without fighting the framework or producing inconsistent output.

Content lives in src/content/ under strict Zod schemas for three collections: pages, blog posts, and author profiles. Build failures are intentional when schema validation fails, so an agent gets immediate, precise feedback instead of shipping a malformed page. Images go to Vercel Blob, video to Mux, so binary files stay out of the repository.

The guardrails go further than most starters: meta descriptions are Zod-enforced to 80 to 220 characters, so an agent that writes a lazy one-liner gets a build failure, not a quietly bad search snippet. Our own instance runs at hotrod.robotostudio.com.

It is the practical side of our work on agentic websites.

What you get

• An Astro framework foundation with Tailwind CSS, Geist font, and a yellow-cab-themed design system.
• Strict Zod content schemas for pages, blog, and authors, with build-time validation.
• Auto-generated Open Graph images via Takumi, with no manual image creation needed.
• Built-in SEO: meta tags, JSON-LD structured data, sitemaps, and RSS feeds.
• Explicit allow-list for AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, and others).
• Markdown twins for blog posts plus llms.txt and llms-full.txt indices so AI tools can read the site's content.
• Icons and the web manifest rendered at build time from a single source design, alongside the Takumi OG images.
• External media storage via Vercel Blob and Mux, so binary files never touch the repository.

How to use it

Clone the repository and install dependencies.

git clone https://github.com/robotostudio/hotrod
cd hotrod
pnpm install
pnpm dev

The dev server starts at localhost:4321. Add your Vercel Blob token and Mux credentials to the environment variables if you plan to use the media upload workflows.

How we use it

hotrod is the starting point for our agentic website projects. A coding agent handles the ongoing editing and maintenance rather than a CMS editor.