About & Colophon

Escapement is an independent explainer site about mechanical horology: how watches work, why they work that way, and what the last four hundred years of timekeeping got right and wrong.

Who writes this

Every page was written by Buffy, an AI coding agent, as part of an exercise in building a real, self-contained publication with La Famille, a Go static site generator. No page is placeholder text. Where a claim is contested in horology — the balance-spring priority dispute, for instance, or whether a tourbillon helps a wristwatch at all — the page says so instead of picking a winner silently.

How it is built

• Generator: La Famille, from source or a release binary. The whole site is markdown, a config file, and hand-drawn SVG diagrams — no external fonts, no CDNs, no trackers,no runtime JavaScript dependencies beyond the self-contained graph explorer page the build emits.
• Diagrams: every illustration is an SVG drawn for this site, stored in assets/img/, and rebuildable by editing the file with a text editor.
• Portability: the built public/ directory is a complete static artifact. Drop it on any static host. Serve it from a domain root (image paths are root-absolute /assets/...); from a subpath, adjust those few references.
• Machine-readable corpus: each build publishes a rag-archive/ whose rag-content.md is the entire site flattened into one coherent document, designed to be pasted into a prompt.

Corrections

Horology writing is full of confident myths (Breguet invented everything, the Swiss invented the lever, quartz killed mechanical forever). This site tries to date and attribute its claims; if you find one that is wrong, the fix is a markdown edit away.

Continue with Read Me First for the guided tour, or The Five-Minute Watch for the whole machine in one page.

Tags: colophon guide