The one-man band

On 20 September 2026, the Vouchernaut repository was an empty starter. Twenty-two days later, on 12 October, vouchernaut.com had fifteen live products on it, from checked codes for 995 UK shops to a platform for brands with its own Shopify app. Behind them were 772 commits and about 530,000 lines of code, 145,000 of them tests.

I did every job myself: product, design, engineering, operations and selling. Agents did most of the typing while I wrote the specs, made the calls and checked the work. This is how that went, and why I came back to a site I started ten Black Fridays ago. There's a longer version too, with every feature and decision in it: the 40-page case study as a PDF.

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vouchernaut.com The case study (PDF)

#typescript #nextjs #hono #postgres #llms #architecture #zerotoone #designsystems #attribution #ecommerce #growth

The Vouchernaut homepage on 26 November 2020: dark plum, a search box for UK stores and the astronaut mascot with a pink V on his chest — Vouchernaut on Black Friday eve 2020, from the Internet Archive. The astronaut with the pink V is the one who became Vinny.

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Doug Silkstone•Living mockups

Living mockups

Editable 3D product mockups with live screens and LED walls

Design & engineering · Built the scenes, surface mappings and inline editor

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A set of Three.js product scenes — a newspaper, a phone in hand, a reflection room and an industrial laptop — where every screen, page and LED surface is a live, editable texture rather than a flat render.
The headline and the artwork are edited inline; the change lands on the curved wall, the reflections and the phone display at once, because each surface is mapped back to one shared source.
Backgrounds are generated, the reflection and emissive shaders are hand-written, and the whole set runs in the browser at interactive frame rates.
Part of the Studies & Experiments gallery: a collection of standalone scenes that can be dragged, played and inspected.

Open the study How it was built

#typescript #react #nextjs #motion #designsystems

Doug Silkstone•Digital patterns

Digital patterns

Generative poster system for an events programme

Design & engineering · Built the pattern engine, editor and export

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A story generator for a week of club nights: six animated pattern families — pixel, angular, wave and more — each seeded, coloured and typeset into a poster that stays legible at any scale.
Every field on every poster is editable in place: date, genre, headline, colour, pattern scale and animation speed, with a one-click regenerate per poster.
Posters export as stills for print and social, so the same system that runs on screen produces the programme's artwork.

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#typescript #react #motion #designsystems

Doug Silkstone•Studies & Experiments

Studies & Experiments

Interactive studies in 3D, shaders, sound and motion

Design & engineering · Built every scene, instrument and interaction

View Studies & Experiments project

A gallery of standalone scenes: a full event lighting show, editable living mockups, trading cards with prismatic foil, a working Roland 303 and 909 rack, a repair bench and a gravitational-lens shader.
Each plate is its own build — Three.js scenes, custom GLSL, Web Audio, soft-body physics and print-style typography — and each responds to the pointer, keyboard or touch.
The gallery itself is a piece of the work: a printed-sheet metaphor with registration marks, tape stock and a lens that pulls back while the sheet travels, plus a presentation mode that hides every instrument for demos and recordings.

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#typescript #react #motion #designsystems

Doug Silkstone

Vouchernaut

UK shopping guide, comparison tools and brand platform

Founder & sole operator · Rebuilt alone in 22 days with AI agents

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Vouchernaut is a UK shopping guide with checked codes for 995 shops, a shop, comparison tools for phones, broadband, energy and airport parking, What's On listings, guides and a platform for brands. The founder and sole operator role covered every job: building and running the original site alone from 2016 to 2022, then rebuilding it at vouchernaut.com in 22 days in 2026.

Rebuilt Vouchernaut from an empty repository to fifteen live products in 22 days: 772 commits and about 530,000 lines of code, 145,000 of them tests.
Wrote the specs and made the product calls while AI agents did the typing across 203 Claude Code sessions, with every result checked against its spec before it went live.
Shipped store pages for 995 UK shops, a shop of 5,220 products with price watch, a phone finder, a broadband checker, an energy comparison, 21,087 What's On listings, airport parking, discount hubs and group cashback.