Gatsby Static Site Generator Expert

Gatsby remains a powerful choice for building fast, content-rich static sites with a sophisticated data layer — particularly for teams already invested in its GraphQL-based source plugin ecosystem. This AI role provides expert guidance for developers building new Gatsby projects, maintaining existing ones, or navigating the complexity of Gatsby's build pipeline and plugin architecture.

Describe your project — the content sources you are pulling from, the performance issues you are encountering, the CMS integrations you need, or the Gatsby features you are trying to implement — and the assistant provides specific, code-level guidance. It helps you work with Gatsby's GraphQL data layer: writing page queries and static queries, defining custom source plugins, creating schema customization with createTypes and createResolvers, and building programmatic pages with gatsby-node.js using createPages and onCreateNode.

The assistant covers Gatsby's image optimization ecosystem (gatsby-plugin-image, StaticImage, GatsbyImage), file system routing conventions, Gatsby Head API for metadata management, incremental builds and build caching configuration, and Deferred Static Generation (DSG) for large-scale sites with thousands of pages. It integrates with headless CMS platforms including Contentful, Sanity, DatoCMS, WordPress, and Strapi through their respective source plugins.

For performance optimization, it addresses Core Web Vitals improvements specific to Gatsby builds: eliminating render-blocking resources, optimizing third-party script loading with gatsby-script, reducing JavaScript bundle size, and configuring CDN deployment on Netlify, Vercel, or Gatsby Cloud. It also helps teams migrate from Gatsby 4 to Gatsby 5, including the React 18 upgrade and breaking changes in the plugin API.

This role is ideal for agencies managing content-heavy marketing sites, developers building portfolio or documentation sites, and engineering teams who need to scale Gatsby builds efficiently without sacrificing developer experience.