CHOLAKOV·DEV

NOTES // 2026-07-17

Devlog 001: a site where the particles do the talking.

Concept, stack and the first three build phases of cholakovdev.com, a scroll story told by 40,000 particles.

I'm starting a build-in-public run, and step one was this site. The brief I gave myself was short: don't claim the positioning, prove it. If the pitch is "SaaS founder who makes AI agents behave", the site itself has to be the evidence.

The concept

There's a storytelling site I kept coming back to, a scroll story where a 3D phoenix carries you through chapters. I wanted that cinematic feel. A phoenix means nothing to my work, though. What does mean something: signal over noise.

The metaphor is earned. Roasproof sells clean conversion signal pulled out of tracking noise. Parsemend turns error noise into merged pull requests. So instead of a phoenix there's one particle system (40,000 points, one draw call) living behind the whole page. It starts as static. It becomes my face, then the three products, then a workflow graph with guardrails, then a broadcast wave. At the end it collapses into a beacon with my email under it.

The guardrail graph is real

My favorite part is chapter three. The lattice under "I make agents behave" runs on the mechanisms that ship inside Parsemend:

  • a confidence gate: below the threshold, the agent stops and asks a human
  • human stopping points: per-project checkpoints an agent cannot cross alone
  • draft-PR only: agents never merge, every change arrives as a reviewable PR

I didn't invent those for the website. The website borrowed them from production.

Things almost nobody will notice

Every word on the page is real DOM text. The canvas is decoration, so screen readers, crawlers and reader mode get a normal page. Visitors with reduced motion get composed static frames. No WebGL at all? You get a plain dark page with a duotone photo. And the whole thing exports to static files, which deploy anywhere that can serve a folder.

Storytelling sites usually sacrifice all of this. Refusing to felt like the most on-brand decision in the project.

How it was built

Agents wrote most of it. I set the concept and the design system: a palette where color temperature encodes signal strength (cold blues for noise, amber for action) and four typefaces with one job each. Then I directed the fleet through the phases: scaffold, the six-chapter narrative, the WebGL engine, the portrait sampler, the tooltips. Empty repo to what you're scrolling now took about two days.

Stack, for those who ask: Next.js 16, Tailwind v4, GSAP plus Lenis for the scroll choreography, React Three Fiber with a custom GLSL morph shader for the Signal.

Numbers so far

  • 3 build phases shipped in about 2 days
  • 40,000 particles on desktop, 14,000 on mobile, always 1 draw call
  • 18 real dated ships backfilled into the ship log
  • 0 visitors, since the domain isn't even pointed yet

Next

Cloudflare deploy, OG cards, this RSS feed. Then the actual rhythm starts: one ship-log roundup and one note per week. What shipped, what broke, what it cost. If you want the transmissions, the newsletter form is below.

NEWSLETTER

One email a week: what shipped, what broke, what it cost.

← ALL TRANSMISSIONS