Auto-generating site mockups for cold outreach: AXL's proof engine

The proof engine is the whole bet: no cold email goes out without a rendered sample site for that specific business, live at its own URL.

The pipeline is Python orchestrating an Astro template. Scout scripts pull prospects from public listings into per-prospect folders; a prep step injects the business's real name, city, phone, and service area into the template; a render step builds four routes (home, about, services, contact); and a publish step puts the result at a private, noindexed URL on my domain. The email leads with that link.

The decision that matters most is the checker. Before anything renders, a mechanical rubric blocks agency-speak, fabricated testimonials, AI-generated photos, and em-dashes. The mockup has to read like an established local trade, not a design demo, because render quality maps directly to reply rate.

The tradeoff: deliverability rails make the operation slow on purpose. Thirty sends a day maximum, spaced minutes apart, bounce and complaint thresholds that pause everything, a warmed domain, and a three-touch sequence where only the first email is human-gated.

The thing that broke: nothing technical. The first nine-prospect test batch went out with mockups attached and produced zero replies before the sequence exhausted. That is the honest baseline. The pipeline is proven end to end; the pitch itself is now the thing under iteration, which is exactly what the instrumentation was built to measure.