Using Discourse MCP to quickly build a theme

Customization Extras
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I ran a test run on DeepSeek 4.1 flash max.

Full transcript is here: https://gisthost.github.io/?28dedf78da999ccca5b5b4feb1d58fc9/index.html

This was a bit contaminated, cause I ran the test on a dv container and at some point the agent decided it might as well more efficiently use Docker to make the changes vs lean on our MCP.

For image generation I used Qwen 3 Image.

For eyes, I gave the agent the chrome-devtools-mcp. This can easily be configured to use chromium on Linux which tends to be my choice:

   "chromium-devtools": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "chrome-devtools-mcp@latest",
        "--headless=true",
        "--executable-path=/usr/bin/chromium",
        "--chrome-arg=--no-sandbox",
        "--chrome-arg=--disable-dev-shm-usage"
      ]
    },

Entire run relied on DeepSeek 4.1 flash for both driver and sub agents.

I used term-llm.com to drive it in TUI mode:

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Results:

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Observations

The brief is critical, if you have a great brief the results will be great, if you have a poor brief you are at the mercy of the LLM. A great brief talks about the structure and colors and gives examples and so on.

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DeepSeek 4.1 flash was very capable in this test and very cheap. At 99% cache read and only 2.8M read tokens, this would have cost about $1.52 off-peak or $3.04 in peak pricing. Astra is significantly more token efficient so this is unfair, but for context Astra pricing for a similar number of tokens would be $325

Conservatively even with token efficiency in mind I would guess you may be able to pull off a design like this in Astra for 50-100 dollars, getting it for 1 dollar 50 is impossible at current API costs.

I ran this on my OpenCode go plan, and did not even feel a small dent in my $10 a month plan:

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A few things impressed me about this run, it was able to run unattended for hours. It acted on the EXACT same brief in the OP diligently and carefully. It did tried to address every point in the brief, it meticulously tested everything. The design was responsive, supported dark/light mode and more.

It got a ton right and the design is solid.

That said this is not GPT 6 Astra, the design feels more like a LLM design to me. The spacing, fonts and attention to detail was not the same as Astra. It is also very clear that it does not have the same fidelity around vision that Astra has, there were many obvious visual glitches after iteration 1, on the upside it was able to correct most of them when prompted.

It refused to fix this one for some reason:

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But the rest of the quirks were handled fine by it.

The most impressive part of the build was how tidy it insisted on being

  • It created a folder for evidence
  • It attempted to cleanly engineer the theme and split it into lots of files and even test it

Overall, don’t expect Astra from a model 50/100 times cheaper, but as a tool it certainly can produce very interesting results for a fraction of the cost.

In retrospect, I would recommend building the theme directly in a dv container and then uploading cause you can run it safely in YOLO mode and the setup is very easy.

Will try to do some more experiments around this next week and post a few more examples. If you have a spectacular brief let me know.

Generally I use multiple LLMs from multiple vendors to build stuff, so a more “how I generally work” type of example may be interesting.

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