What Magpie is made of

A bird that collects shiny things ought to show you its own nest.

This site spends its time judging other people's software, so here is everything it leans on itself — 26 things, and the list keeps growing. 17 of them are on the shelf out there, graded by the very same questions as everything else, with nothing on the scale.

0 of them are on order: chosen by asking the shop downstairs, and not yet fetched. Those carry the sentence that was asked and what came back, because a decision worth making is worth being able to re-read — and they keep carrying it after they arrive.

1 was not taken in the end: fetched, measured against this room rather than against every room, and put back. Those are the honest ones. The shop judges a project on its merits; whether it fits here is a second question, and it is ours to answer.

—
Cloudflare Workers
Runs the whole thing. No server to keep awake.
A platform rather than a repository — there is nothing to clone.
A
workerd
The runtime underneath Workers, which is open.
—
D1
Holds every judgment, caption and click.
SQLite as a service; the engine below is on the shelf, the service is not.
S
SQLite
The engine D1 is built on, and the reason a query here is a seek.
—
Jev
Every judgment on this site. Asked only questions with a finite set of answers.
Not open source. Reached through Cloudflare's AI Gateway.
A
BAML
Where the questions are written, tested and frozen into JSON the edge can ship.
S
TypeScript
The whole codebase, checked before anything deploys.
A
Node
Runs the tests and the scripts. The test runner is the one built in.
—
Vectorize
Finds what a README means, so the shortlist does not depend on somebody having thought of the category.
A Cloudflare service; there is nothing to clone.
—
bge-base-en
Turns a README into 768 numbers. Runs on the Workers AI binding, so it never leaves the edge.
Model weights on Hugging Face rather than a repository we could judge.
—
GitHub's GraphQL API
Metadata, a README at a date, and a commit count in one request.
An API, not a project.
B
Brotli
Squeezes the corpus index from 121 KB to 50 KB on the wire.
C
just
The handful of commands worth remembering.
—
Wrangler
Deploys the Worker and talks to the database.
B
Fuse.js
Finding a thing in the hoard by half its name, without a round trip to the server.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to filter a few thousand items already loaded in the browser as the visit… and the shop said Take it at 0.81, warning: it quietly gives wrong answers.
C
Hurl
Asks every endpoint whether it still answers, after every deploy, and names the one that stopped.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to write down what each HTTP endpoint should return — status, headers, a … and the shop said Take it at 0.95, warning: it quietly gives wrong answers.
C
axe-core
Finding out whether the shelves can actually be read, by keyboard or by screen reader.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to check the HTML the server produces for contrast, control names and hea… and the shop said Take it at 0.83, warning: it quietly gives wrong answers.
C
lefthook
Runs the checks before a commit is allowed through, so nothing has to be remembered.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to have deployed broken code more than once by running the deploy command… and the shop said Take it at 0.54, warning: it breaks loudly and stops.
C
Renovate
Keeping everything on this page from quietly going stale.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to about to take on several dependencies for the first time, and they wil… and the shop said Take it at 0.81, warning: it breaks loudly and stops.
B
Biome
Formats everything in one pass, and catches the dead import nobody noticed.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to no linter and no formatter, so style drifts and mistakes like an unuse… and the shop said Take it at 0.77, warning: it breaks loudly and stops.
B
htmx
Clicking a button and getting the next question back, without anybody writing a fetch call.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to put an attribute on a button so clicking it fetches a fragment of HTML… and the shop said Take it at 0.69, warning: it just looks wrong.
C
Commander
One command with subcommands, instead of a dozen scripts each parsing its own flags.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to a dozen one-off Node scripts for backfills, evals and deploys, each pa… and the shop said Take it at 0.68, warning: it breaks loudly and stops.
B
Hono
Seeing every route in one place, instead of a thousand-line chain of path comparisons.
Chosen downstairs, and now in use. Asked for something to a small router for a Worker that has become one long chain of if-state… and the shop said Take it at 0.62, warning: it breaks loudly and stops.
B
XState not taken
Writing the question flow's states down in one place, so going back or reloading has a defined answer.
Chosen downstairs, fetched, measured, and put back. Asked for something to the states of an adaptive question flow — ask, refine, show finalists,… and the shop said Take it at 0.76, warning: it quietly gives wrong answers. Not taken: the flow that got built keeps every step in the URL, so there is no state in the browser for a machine to hold — and it ships at 13.2 KB
—
b28-clay.css
The soft edges and warm shadows, shared with the rest of b28.dev.
Ours, vendored from b28.dev.
—
Lora & Karla
The lettering.
Typefaces, served by Google Fonts.

About those letters

They are worked out live, by rank within the whole corpus, exactly as they are on the front page. Nobody adjusted them for being ours — which is why just sits where it does. A justfile is not a paradigm shift, and the ranking is not embarrassed to say so.

A dash means there was nothing to judge: a hosted platform, a typeface, an API, or something that is not open in the first place.

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