How Our Studio
Infrastructure Works

Safety rule: Gate files are excluded from every deploy via rsync --exclude flags. A deploy can never overwrite a client's staging page.

Alerts via 3 channels: Telegram bot, FCM push notifications to a custom Android app, and a web dashboard. State machine fires only on transitions (up→down, down→up) with cooldowns to prevent spam. Manual backups triggered remotely via Telegram — no laptop needed.

Disaster recovery: Full rebuild procedure documented — provision VPS, upload backup, restore configs, install runtime, pm2 resurrect. Under 1 hour with backups available.

51 knowledge items covering every project, service, database, and infrastructure pattern in the studio.

Key principle: Skills are never deleted or overwritten. If a process changes, old steps are marked deprecated and new ones added. This preserves full history and prevents accidental loss.

The result: Over time, Arlo builds a living encyclopedia of the entire studio. Nothing forgotten, nothing undocumented. Every pattern reusable. When a new project starts, Arlo already knows how to deploy, monitor, gate, audit, and back it up.

The BRAIN.md manifest: A single file at the root of the knowledge-skills repo that indexes all 60+ knowledge items and 27 skills, grouped by category. Arlo reads this at the start of every conversation — solving the "each day starts again" problem. Without it, the agent has to rediscover what it knows each time. With it, full context is loaded instantly.

⚠️ Artifact preservation: Generated images, logos, and documents are saved to a temporary directory (~/.gemini/antigravity/brain/{id}/) that gets wiped between conversations. Any generated asset — mockups, logos, diagrams, screenshots — must be copied to ~/studio-documents/{client}/ before the conversation ends. Nothing should ever exist only in the ephemeral directory.

The playbook audit: Monthly, scan all projects on the VPS and local machine. Extract every undocumented pattern, feature, and technique into new knowledge items and skills. This is how the brain grows — every project teaches something, and those lessons get captured for every future project. Run the playbook-audit skill to execute this systematically.

The philosophy: Robustness isn't about reacting to failures — it's about building systems so comprehensive that failures are caught before they matter. Every new project automatically gets the full stack: monitoring, backups, version control, knowledge, and safety checks.

"What if the server goes down?" — The 4-tier backup strategy means a full rebuild takes under an hour. Provision a new VPS, upload the latest backup, restore configs, done. We also get alerted within 30 seconds via Telegram and push notifications, so we'd know before any client does.

"No CDN — isn't that slow?" — For client staging sites and small-to-medium production sites, a single well-configured VPS with Nginx caching is more than fast enough. If a project ever needs global edge delivery, we can add Cloudflare in front without changing anything else.

"What about auto-scaling?" — We don't need it. Our projects don't get sudden traffic spikes of millions of users. The VPS handles our traffic comfortably. If that ever changes, scaling up the VPS or adding a load balancer is straightforward.

"Why not just use Vercel?" — We could, and it's great for what it does. But we need custom Nginx routing, PIN-gated staging, Telegram bots, custom monitoring, server-side APIs, and full SSH access — things that platforms don't offer. For a multi-project studio, owning the infrastructure gives us flexibility that no platform matches.

The key insight: You almost never type terminal commands yourself. You describe what you want in plain English, the agent figures out the commands, and you approve them. Over time, it learns your entire infrastructure and can handle almost anything autonomously.

SEO warning: Gate pages do NOT block search engines — bots ignore JavaScript. Every staging subdomain needs robots.txt (Disallow: /), <meta name="robots" content="noindex">, and an Nginx X-Robots-Tag: noindex header. Remove all three only when a site officially goes live.