Proving the foundation was actually reusable

Any architecture claims reusability. The only honest test is building the second thing. Riflessi Auto Care went from empty repository to live in five weeks by swapping design-token values and rewriting content against fixed type contracts — every component survived untouched. That is the evidence the first project’s abstractions were load-bearing rather than decorative.

The honest version matters too: the parts that did need new code were the motion layer and the 3D stage, which were new capability rather than re-theming. A reuse claim that omits what did not reuse is not worth making.

The 19 MB hero

The hard problem was the hero: a licensed 3D vehicle model that weighed 19.07 MB, on a site holding a sub-1.5-second budget.

The detail worth telling is why the obvious approach failed. The asset named every single node identically, so node-name matching found nothing — all the semantic meaning lived in the material names. So I deleted hidden geometry by material instead, then profiled and found the tyres alone were 63% of the model, decimated them from 205k to 96k vertices, stripped all seven textures because paint is applied at runtime, then welded, deduplicated, quantized and meshopt-compressed. The result was 2.05 MB, an 89% reduction, with a content-hashed filename so a one-year immutable cache header is actually safe.

Gating the import, not the render

The 3D scene is gated at the dynamic import rather than the render, so a device that cannot run it never downloads the chunk at all — viewport, CPU core count, device memory and a WebGL2 probe decide, and prefers-reduced-motion overrides every other signal. Gating the render would have been easier and would have shipped the payload anyway.

The image pipeline blurs licence plates and strips all EXIF before publish. That is not a nice-to-have: the shop is run from home and the site deliberately withholds the address, which camera GPS metadata would have published on the first photo upload. Privacy belonged in the build step, not in a checklist someone remembers.