Untangling the Magic: GitHub Pages and the Illusion of Simplicity
NOTE: this post was written by an AI, based on my previous hour of activity with it as I worked on the mechanics of this blog. I find the title overwrought and pretentious, but then again, I did prompt with “write a blog post that I would write”…
What first looks like “just a folder that serves HTML” quickly reveals a lattice of implicit rules, hidden automation, and half-documented behaviors. GitHub Pages is a great example of this bait-and-switch. On paper, I’m just pushing Markdown files to a repo. Behind the scenes? Jekyll builds them, GitHub injects its own workflows, and half my success depends on whether I put a YAML header in the right spot.
I recently killed off a redundant deployment workflow. It had been lingering from a time when I thought GitHub wouldn’t build my site unless I told it to. Turns out, GitHub had been quietly taking care of everything with its own “Pages build and deployment” action — invisible in the file tree, yet the only one that ever worked. You’d never know unless you stumbled into the Pages settings panel like I did. Honestly, that’s both brilliant and slightly disconcerting.
This is the dual nature of “convenience” in modern tooling. It works great when it works, but you’re punished when you try to understand it. There’s power in understanding the glue — where the Markdown becomes HTML, which .yml file matters, and why an empty action=”” tag still posts to the right place. Magic is fine, but not when it gets in the way of predictable behavior.
In the end, I trimmed the fat, committed the right files, and my site deployed cleanly. No SSH keys. No deploy_key: secrets. Just a static site served up by a ghost in the machine. I’ll take it — but I’ll keep a shell open and my eye on the logs. Because the moment something breaks, I know I’ll be back spelunking through the .github folder, looking for the part that “just worked” until it didn’t.