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SentryEli LennoxProblem & solution
How we cut build times by two-thirds by deleting our CMS
Summary
Sentry rebuilt its marketing site and blog of roughly 2,500 pages, replacing a legacy Gatsby setup and traditional headless CMS with Astro, Markdown, Frontmatter, and AI-driven automation. The previous architecture suffered from 14-minute build times, restrictive CMS schema limits, and frequent build failures caused by external API dependencies. A team of 2.5 developers executed the migration in two months using Claude Code agents for data extraction, template translation, and testing. To manage content without a CMS dashboard, Sentry built Claude Skills to guide updates, run local previews, and draft GitHub pull requests. The migration reduced average build times to under 4 minutes, cut broken staging builds by 95 percent, and improved Web Vitals scores from 89 to 97.
Context
Sentry's marketing site and blog spanned around 2,500 pages running on Gatsby and a headless CMS. Builds averaged 14 minutes across roughly 95 daily runs (consuming ~22 build hours daily), schema limits required paid plugins, and external API and plugin dependencies caused frequent build failures.
Approach / What changed
Sentry migrated the site to Astro and Vite, moving all content into local Markdown and Frontmatter files and offloading image processing to Vercel. A small team used Claude Code agents to translate CMS schemas, consolidate roughly 200 pages into 3 templates, and run visual regression tests via a custom DOM Inspector MCP. Content editing was replaced by CLI-based Claude Skills that guide users through Frontmatter edits, local previews, and GitHub PR creation, while form data was cached in Vercel Blob to prevent marketing API rate limits.
Takeaways
Migrating from Gatsby and a headless CMS to Astro, Vite, and file-based Frontmatter reduced build times from 14 minutes to under 4 minutes, saving approximately 15.8 build hours daily.
Replacing external CMS dependencies with Git-tracked Markdown files eliminated API outages during builds and removed schema restrictions imposed by SaaS tiers.
A small team of 2.5 developers executed the 2,500-page migration in two months by using Claude Code agents for planning, data extraction, template translation, and automated testing.
Source and freshness
- Source
- blog.sentry.io
- Published
- Added to Yomu
- Last updated
Summaries are generated from the original by a language model. Check the original before relying on it.
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