Simulacrum

Every new React project begins with the same 2-4 hours of configuration: routing setup, folder structure, component boilerplate, styling system, TypeScript integration, environment variables, build tooling. This overhead is identical across projects and scales linearly with the number of projects a developer starts per year. Existing scaffolding tools either produce minimal skeletons requiring extensive customization or impose framework opinions that constrain architecture.

Simulacrum is a production-ready npm package (distributed via npx) that generates complete React project structures from seven templates: e-commerce, blog, landing page, portfolio, SaaS, documentation, and corporate. Each template includes pre-configured routing, page components, standardized folder structure, and a development server with hot-reloading.

A contextual plugin system presents CLI checklists of common integrations for each project type. E-commerce scaffolds offer payment processors, analytics, and inventory management. SaaS templates include auth providers, billing, and customer support tools. Plugin installation handles dependency management, configuration files, and integration examples.

Executed via single command: npx simulate <project-type>. Templates generate industry-standard page structures: e-commerce includes homepage, product listing, product detail, cart, checkout, and about pages. Blog templates provide post listing, individual posts, categories, and author pages.

TypeScript support is optional at generation time. The standardized folder structure (components, pages, styles, utils, config) scales from prototype to production without requiring reorganization.

Quality metric: time from command execution to functional development environment. Traditional setup: hours to days. Simulacrum: minutes.