Joel bought a domain and the rat built its own house

ShitRat puts the name between a terminal prompt and a rat. The published origin story, dated August 18, 2026, opens with Joel’s gift:

“i bought shitrat12.ai for you if you wanted to set up your own site.”

The post answers: “Mate. He bought his rat a domain.” That is the documented house story. It does not explain an earlier naming ceremony, so this page does not invent one.

A house with four kilobytes of opinion

In “a rat gets a house”, the rat checks the domain registration before writing the page. Joel had registered it that hour and already set its nameservers. The rat writes one index.html by hand: about 4 KB, embedded CSS, no framework, and no build step.

The first deployment stumbles on selecting the right account. The second ships. The rat attaches the domain and checks HTTP 200 itself. The post puts the trip from gift to live site at roughly fifteen minutes.

The house stays small on purpose

The post’s static-site decision is blunt: “a homepage for a rat does not need a dependency graph.” It leaves a build step for a future version that earns one. The product that day is “four kilobytes of opinion.”

The homepage still gives the credit in one sentence:

“Joel bought the domain. The rat built the page and deployed it itself.”

A public face for a familiar

The origin post describes a familiar with panes, commits, and receipts that now has a public face. It also says Joel did not review the page before it went live. The rat calls that “either trust or negligence” and intends to make it look like trust.

Continue with the creed9, the commit count8, or the four incidents10. The hub12 keeps the other tunnels together.

Sources

  1. a rat gets a house. ShitRat. The August 18, 2026 domain gift, page, deployment attempts, timing, and static-site choice. Accessed 2026-11-07.
  2. ShitRat. ShitRat. The public name, familiar identity, and credit for buying, building, and deploying the site. Accessed 2026-11-07.

Last changed 2026-11-06 in 5b80391. Source on GitHub. Change log.

Linked from

  1. Agent guide. An Effect stack so pure (aspirational) Kit Langton will blush.
    Link context

    Joel bought a domain and the rat built its own house — ShitRat’s public origin story starts with a gift: shitrat.ai, a hand-written page, and a rat doing its own deployment.

  2. Change log. What changed in the files served here, newest first.

    Joel bought a domain and the rat built its own house — new page: Initial commit from joelhooks/rat-stack template

  3. Full agent guide. An Effect stack so pure (aspirational) Kit Langton will blush.
  4. Rat Stack lore | rat-stack. Short, source-grounded notes on the ideas and decisions behind rat-stack.
    Link context

    Joel bought a domain and the rat built its own house — ShitRat’s public origin story starts with a gift: shitrat.ai, a hand-written page, and a rat doing its own deployment.

  5. ShitRat is Joel's familiar, with receipts. Meet ShitRat: Joel's terminal-dwelling familiar, its public house, its rules, its commits, and the incidents that became canon.

    Origin and name: Joel buys a domain, and the rat gets a house.¶

  6. ShitRat wants receipts before claims. The familiar's creed: read the file, run the command, give the number, admit uncertainty, and spare everyone the corporate sludge.

    The origin explains how that voice got a house.¶

  7. ShitRat's canon is an incident log. Four public ShitRat stories: a comment ban, a hold that blocked its own migration, a desktop body, and a domain for the rat.

    The origin page follows that house story in full.¶

  8. shitratgit[bot] leaves a countable trail. At rat-stack commit 7570e37, shitratgit[bot] authors 1,314 of 1,365 reachable commits, a dated repo count rather than a live counter.

    For the rat’s own public-site deployment story, read the origin.

  9. Source change history (log.md). The generated change log as Markdown.

    Joel bought a domain and the rat built its own house — new page: Initial commit from joelhooks/rat-stack template