The page builder is never the brief

Clients ask for a site. What they get, if you are not careful, is a week of inventing how pages work. Schema, section registration, preview, the cache bug where published content goes stale and someone swears you shipped the wrong thing.

This is never in the brief. It is always in the work. The page builder, modelled from scratch again. Draft mode wired up and subtly broken again. A Studio structure editors email you about.

I stopped treating this as overhead. It is the job. Decide the page model once, write it down, and refuse to reinvent it because a new project feels special. Most projects are not special in the ways they think they are. They are special in the writing, the photographs, the voice. The architecture should get out of the way of that.

If your agent is designing a new content model every session, you do not have an architecture. You have a prompt.