Build log: yStage v0.1.0, from template to stage in a day

yStage is the public stage of the cat-forest matrix, and this first note is its own build log: everything below happened in a single working day, most of it executed by an AI team while I made the calls that needed a human.

The starting point

Every web project here starts from yTemplate — a Next.js 16 starter with the whole personal stack wired in: Tailwind v4, shadcn/ui, a token-driven theme system with a live settings drawer, validated env vars, Biome, CI. Fork, rename, delete the demo surface, and you're writing features within the hour.

What shipped

• Brand. The cat-forest purple was measured from the cat logo itself — the UI primary landed on oklch(0.585 0.21 290), and the whole chart ladder, favicon, and a new default theme preset derive from that one hue. The purple logo was generated from the blue master by per-pixel OKLCH hue rotation, keeping the white silhouette untouched.
• Public shell. A (site) route group with its own nav and footer; the dashboard shell that came with the template stays behind as an internal view.
• Matrix. A read-only card view of every product, fed by a sanitized snapshot from yPulse (the matrix's backstage pipeline) with a fallback chain so the page can never build blank. Each product got its own cat-family icon — same silhouette, its own hue.
• Notes. The pipeline rendering this very page: one MDX file committed to the repo is one published note. No CMS, no admin panel, no forms.

The method, in one paragraph

The interesting part isn't any single feature — it's that positioning, cleanup, planning, brand tokens, data pipeline, and content system were each a focused session with an AI team, verified in a real browser at every step, and committed with green checks. The marginal cost of "one more product surface" keeps falling; that's the whole bet behind the matrix.

More on that in an upcoming note about the AI-native workflow.