Keystatic in Practice

Keystatic runs locally during bun run dev and writes back to the same files in src/data/ that Astro reads at build time. There is no separate database and no draft store — the Git history is the editorial trail.

What this gets us

• A WYSIWYG editor for non-engineers without a hosted CMS bill.
• Branch-based previews. Every editor change is a normal commit, so reviewers see the diff in the same PR as the code.
• Schema validation at build. A missing category is caught by Zod before the page renders.

What it does not solve

Keystatic is local-first by design. There is no hosted editor for a teammate who does not run the repo. We accept that — the people writing posts here already have the project checked out.

A small workflow note

When two writers branch from main at the same time, the second one to merge is responsible for re-running bun run dev against the merged tree. Keystatic does not show conflicts; the file system does.