On Friday I was made redundant. A year of work, wrapped up in a meeting.
I gave myself an hour to feel weird, then I got to work.
This is what came out the other side.
The rule
One rule, set on Friday afternoon: ship something every day, for seven days. Not polish, not pitch, not plan. Ship. Public URL, shareable link, real users if possible. AI doing the heavy lifting, me doing the taste. No skipping a day. No "I'll finish it tomorrow."
Partly that was practical. I wanted to find out, honestly and without a salary funding the experiment, what an agentic design and build practice can actually output when the only constraint is throughput.
Mostly it was personal. The thing I wanted to prove to myself, more than to any future employer, was that the love of building is still the thing that gets me out of bed. Redundancy doesn't change that. If anything it cleared the runway.
Seven days later, here's the receipt.
01 / Friday · A new portfolio, from scratch
pjcooper.design, rebuilt end to end. New IA, new visual system, new blog, new catalogue, new playground. Built in Next.js with Claude Code as the primary collaborator.
Day one had to set the tone. Whatever I shipped on Friday afternoon would frame everything that came after, so the portfolio went first. Not a refresh, the old site got binned. This one positions me how I actually work now: design, engineering, content and AI as a single craft, not four departments to coordinate between. Live by midnight.
02 / Saturday · A journal that writes itself, sort of
/blog, a working publication, not a "coming soon."
With the portfolio standing, day two needed to be the spine of the week. So I stood up the journal: pipeline, layouts, generative cover patterns, first post live by Saturday night. Drafting and structure handled by an agent pipeline I'd been quietly tuning for months, voice and call-it-shots staying with me. The bottleneck is taste, not typing.
The journal also set the rule that made the rest of the week stick. Every subsequent ship would get a release note here, on the day. No write-up, no ship.
03 / Sunday · A typeface
CooperPixel, a two-weight pixel typeface, designed in code, shipped as .otf, .ttf, .woff and .woff2. Release notes here.
I'd been doodling glyphs for months and never finished it. Turns out "finishing" is what an agent is for. Generated, iterated, exported, packaged, published.
04 / Monday · A mindful game
Cairn, a browser stone-stacking toy. Real physics, gallery-white scene, no fail states, no score. Stack until it falls, or until you stop.
I'd wanted this since seeing someone build a cairn on a Korean travel show. It existed in my head for two years. It existed on the internet four hours after I started.
05 / Tuesday · A mint, finally
Phanackapan #14, a long-forgotten NFT collection of mine, dragged out of the drawer and given a proper mint site on Ethereum mainnet. Claim is live, capped at 460.
Designed and built in an afternoon. The collection has been sitting on a hard drive since the last cycle. It deserved a home.
06 / Wednesday · A word game, and a community
Tessera, a daily 4x4 word puzzle. Same puzzle for everyone, resets at UTC midnight. Now lives at its own domain, tesserapuzzle.com, with its own subreddit at r/TesseraPuzzle.
Designed, built, shipped, posted. Over 150 plays in under eight hours. Real strangers, real solves, real arguments about whether ESES is a word. (It isn't, in my dictionary. That's a whole other post.) A press kit lives here if you want the full story.
07 / Thursday · A campaign, for a friend
robotcossey.com, a campaign landing page for the artist and sculptor Robot Cossey, built to promote his latest body of work.
By day seven I'd promised myself I wouldn't ship anything just for me. The point of the rule was the rule, not personal vanity, so closing the week with something for someone else felt right. Robot mentioned the launch on Wednesday, I offered to build the page Wednesday night, it went live Thursday afternoon.
A small thing in absolute terms. But the bigger thing is this: a week earlier, helping a friend with a launch site would have meant clearing two weekends and apologising for the timeline. With the right setup it's a phone call and an evening. That's the part of this that has changed.
What this proves
- Day
- Ship
- Fri
- Portfolio rebuilt end to end
- Sat
- Journal stood up, first post live
- Sun
- CooperPixel typeface released
- Mon
- Cairn shipped
- Tue
- Phanackapan mint live
- Wed
- Tessera launched
- Thu
- robotcossey.com live
I want to be careful not to oversell the lesson here. Seven days of solo making is not a business. A typeface and a stone-stacking toy don't pay a mortgage. I'm aware.
But the speed is the point, and the speed is real. Seven shipped artefacts across product, brand, type, web3, game design and a friend's launch, with one operator, in seven days. A few years ago that would have been a studio quarter. Now it's one week with good tools, a clear head and the stubbornness to not skip a day.
The thing I underestimated going in was the tenacity tax. Six days is a sprint anyone can pull off on adrenaline. The seventh is where it stops being fun. Day seven is when the rule earns its keep, when shipping becomes an act of will rather than enthusiasm. The whole experiment lands or falls on that one day. Mine landed.
Not "AI-assisted." Not "AI-augmented." Operated. The AI is the output layer; I'm the strategy, taste and direction. The thing that gets you to seven is loving the work.
This is what I mean when I say agent-operated design.
What's next
I'm open to work. UK, EU, remote. Senior IC, design lead, FDE, or short-form contract. If your team is trying to figure out how to ship at this kind of cadence, that's the conversation I most want to have.
Onwards.
From the Catalogue