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The Selves of Us
A premium digital literary magazine + podcast platform — explicitly anti-AI-generated-content, with a real-time multi-role editorial workflow.
View the product pageThe problem
Serve readers tired of algorithmic noise while supporting two opposed audiences in one codebase: fast public reader pages (SEO, archives, podcast) and a real-time, multi-role editorial admin. Every published piece must be human-written; AI assists, never authors.
Architecture
How it’s wired
Reader pages are cached (ISR); admin reads are always fresh. The editorial thread between founder and editor runs over Supabase Realtime. AI assistants are isolated to the system prompt and cannot author publishable copy.
3
role-isolated dashboards
~24
tables (RLS)
<2 min
newsletter send
60s
publish→public (ISR)
Stack
Next.js 15React 19TypeScriptSupabase (Postgres + Realtime)Anthropic ClaudeTiptap (rich text)ResendUpstashSentrysanitize-htmlVitest + Playwright
AI
Three Anthropic Claude assistants (Sonnet 4.6) — Mirror AI (writing reflection), Librarian AI (reader guide), Editor’s Eye (editorial) — all sharing a HUMAN_VOICE prompt and constrained so they can never produce publishable copy.
Data model
~24 tables · RLS + policies · 7 enums
- profiles (role: founder | editor | studio) → stories → {editorial_messages, story_versions, comments, mirrors}
- story_status enum: draft → pending → needs_edits → resubmitted → approved → published
- soft-delete everywhere (deleted_at) — never a hard delete
Key decisions
Why it’s built this way
ADR-01
Supabase over Firebase
- Context
- A deeply relational model (stories ↔ authors ↔ editorial messages ↔ comments).
- Decision
- Postgres with FKs/joins + RLS + built-in Realtime.
- Consequence
- Integrity at the DB level, no client-side join drift, no separate WebSocket service.
ADR-02
Edge auth in middleware
- Context
- Three roles must be isolated.
- Decision
- Validate JWT + fetch role + path-match redirect before the page renders.
- Consequence
- An editor hitting the founder’s route is redirected before render — protection isn’t trusted to components.
ADR-03
Cookieless admin client behind explicit role checks
- Context
- A service client that forwarded caller cookies ran RLS-bound and silently no-opped privileged writes.
- Decision
- A cookieless admin client used only after an explicit role check.
- Consequence
- Fixed silent failures — "the recurring lesson of this build."
ADR-04
ISR on public pages, fresh reads for admin
- Context
- Readers need speed/SEO; admins need live state.
- Decision
- revalidate:60 for public, fetch-every-request for admin.
- Consequence
- Published stories appear publicly within ~60s; admins always see current state.
The hard parts, solved
RLS silently no-opping privileged writes
A service client forwarding cookies ran under RLS and silently dropped writes — root-caused and fixed with a cookieless admin client; is_admin() and my_role() search_path were also hardened.
Removing 83 (x as any).from() casts
Regenerating database types from the live schema and de-casting surfaced and fixed 5 latent bugs (a PayFast amount string going into a numeric column, null .replace/.join, unknown into a Json column).
A documented runbook + handover
Ten operational procedures (password reset, unpublish, soft-delete/restore, newsletter + Facebook failure, RLS diagnosis, Vercel rollback) plus a plain-language client handover checklist.
Sourced from theselvesofus — ARCHITECTURE, BUILD-JOURNEY, RUNBOOK, DEPLOYMENT, HANDOVER-CHECKLIST.
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