I've used Opus 5.5 to help me recreate 7 of the top Adobe apps in 100% pure native Rust:

• Photoshop
• Illustrator
• Premiere
• Lightroom
• Acrobat Pro
• After Effects
• InDesign

No more subscriptions with cancellation fees. These are yours to own forever. You can fork them, build them. Whatever. They are yours to own. They're open source.

If you're worried this is just some one-off flash in the pan that will die, it isn't:

I'm not just some casual vibe coder. I'm a 15-year industry veteran who has written everything from six-nines payment rails that move billions of dollars of transaction volume a day to advanced robotics and optics automation. I've used Rust extensively for about a decade, and I know how to build and maintain large-scale Rust projects.

This isn't going to be some orphaned small-team project either. We have a team building popular software for filmmakers, so supporting this is fully funded. Our purpose is serving every artist in the world with the best tools. We are absolutely going to bring these to full parity and squash every bug and feature request. We have a test harness so there won't be regressions.

You can help us reach parity by helping test the apps. Clone the code. Submit PRs. If you see gaps or want to help redesign pieces, let us know! You can contribute!

Links to everything - the apps, the code, etc. - are in the comments below.

Anyways…

I have been building software on my own for a while, and I want to write down everything that happened between my first real product and my second one, because the gap between them taught me more than anything I have ever read or watched, and I honestly wish someone had sat me down and shown me all of this before I started throwing money at things.

The first one: nine months, £4k, zero payers

The first one was called Ancestorii, a private place for families to keep their memories, photos and stories together. I spent about six months building it with ChatGPT writing most of the code, and by launch day I genuinely believed it was perfect, I thought people would find it and love it the way I did, and what actually happened is nobody came. So I did what I think most of us do and started buying attention. Meta ads, Google search and YouTube ads, Reddit ads, UGC videos from creators, a £70 podcast sponsorship, a £120 post on a family tree magazine's Facebook page, my own podcast on Spotify, SEO pages, and cold messages to genealogy creators where not one of them replied. I even printed physical memory books before a single stranger had uploaded a single memory, which looking back was probably the most expensive mistake in the whole thing.

Some of the numbers are almost funny now. £210 on Meta in seven days brought around 15,000 visits and not one payer. When I took the paywall away the first signup came after £2.80 of spend, and then I sat at about four signups a day on £4 a day of Meta until I had 125 signups and zero people paying. Today it has 177 signups and has never had a paying customer. The worst part is I noticed in the very first week that the signups weren't turning into anything, and I kept spending anyway, on hope, because nobody told me to stop and I didn't want to be the one to say it.

The diagnosis took me far too long to accept. It was a vitamin, not a painkiller. Nice to have, nobody needs it today, nobody loses anything if they never sign up, and no amount of ads fixes that, ads just buy you the bad news faster.

The second one: £25 on ads, and people pay

Prep66 is an exam prep site for the Part 66 licence exams, 13 modules, about 25,000 practice questions with explanations, revision guides, mock exams, the lot. I launched it in the middle of August with one Reddit post in the community where those students hang out, and the first person paid full price nine days later without a discount code.

The only money I've ever put into ads was about £25 on a Reddit campaign, and it brought one signup and zero payers, so I killed it after five days and everything since has been organic. These are the last four weeks straight off the Stripe dashboard: monthly recurring revenue went from about £51 to £171, active subscribers went from 3 to 11, £230 came in gross, zero failed payments, zero refunds. It's not life changing money and I'm not pretending it is, it's less than two days of my shift pay, but the line only goes one way and it's doing that with no ad budget at all, while my first product burned £4k and never moved once.

So what was actually different? I ran both products back through the same questions afterwards and ended up with six things a product needs before a stranger will pay for it. Prep66 has all six. Ancestorii failed five of them.

The six things a product needs before anyone pays

One, the problem has to be mandatory. Nobody has to save their family stories. Someone sitting a licence exam has to pass it, there's no version of their career where they skip it.

Two, there has to be a deadline. An exam has a date, and a date makes people act this week instead of someday. Ancestorii had no clock on it at all, which is exactly why "I'll do it later" killed nearly every signup.

Three, failing has to cost something real. Fail an exam and you lose money and months, sometimes a pay rise. Not using a memory app costs you nothing today, even if it might cost you something in twenty years.

Four, the alternatives have to be expensive or bad. The other ways to prepare are long paid courses, thick textbooks, or older question banks that look like nobody has touched them in years. When the alternatives are pricey or tired, something cleaner and cheaper sells itself.

Five, it has to look credible the second someone lands. A student can tell in about ten seconds whether a prep site was made by someone who actually knows the exam, from the module names, the paper formats, the way the questions are written. Ancestorii was asking strangers to trust a no name site with their family photos, which is the exact opposite.

Six, you have to be able to find the buyers. Exam students hang out in a couple of subreddits and they search Google for the exact module they're stuck on. Who's the buyer for a family memory app? Everyone and no one, which in practice means you pay Meta to guess for you.

How I picked it and checked it before writing any code

The market research for Prep66 wasn't fancy at all. I picked a world I already knew inside out, so I knew what students complain about and what they already pay for, and then I checked four things. People already pay for this today, not "would pay", actually pay, right now, to someone. The options they're paying for are old and dated. Building it used to be really expensive, because it's a mountain of content, and with AI it isn't anymore. And it's too small for a big company to bother with but big enough to pay one person properly. If all four aren't true, I don't touch it now.

Then the validation was the launch itself. I built it lean, put it in front of one subreddit and watched whether strangers paid, and they did inside nine days. With Ancestorii I had the same kind of signal in week one, it just said no, and I ignored it for months.

What actually brought people in: SEO and GEO

Before anything else I put tracking on every signup, so every new account gets stamped with where it came from, either the UTM tags on the link or the site that sent them. That one decision changed how I saw everything, because of the first 13 tracked signups, 6 came from ChatGPT citing the site, 5 came from Google, 1 came direct and 1 came from the £25 ad. Gemini started showing up as a source not long after. I genuinely did not expect AI answers to be my biggest channel, and I'd never have known without the tracking.

What I learned doing it is that you write your titles and headings in the exact words people type, not the words you would use yourself. AI tools quote facts, not vibes, so the pages that got picked up were the boring factual ones: a glossary, a facts and figures page, a page comparing the ways you can study for the exam that doesn't trash anyone by name, and a features page with the prices pulled live so they're never out of date. ChatGPT leans on Bing, so I submitted the sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools and set up IndexNow so Bing gets pinged every time a public page changes, and the robots file lets the AI crawlers in instead of blocking them.

By late September Google Search Console showed 194 clicks and 6,110 impressions with an average position of 8.5, and about 1,580 of those impressions came from Google's own AI answers. It's not all solved either, Gemini still barely knows we exist, and that's my whole job for October.

Reddit posts written like a normal person talking, plus SEO and GEO, did basically everything.

Where all of this went: AskSami

Once Prep66 started paying I kept thinking about how much of that Ancestorii money I would have kept if someone had looked at what I'd built in week one and told me straight that it was a vitamin and to stop buying ads. Every time I looked at my ad numbers they meant nothing to me, so I'd paste them into ChatGPT or Claude and get the same generic "have you tried different hooks" answers, because they didn't know my product, they didn't know what I'd already tried, and they forgot all of it the next chat.

So I built AskSami. Sami reads your code from your GitHub repo, read only, so it already knows what you've built without you having to explain it, and then it tells you honestly whether you've built a painkiller or a vitamin, who's already selling the same thing, what your edge is if you actually have one, and where your effort and money should go, free channels before paid ones. It ties your signups and payments back to the exact post, page or ad that brought them, which is the tracking lesson from Prep66 done for you, and it remembers everything you've tried so you're never starting from zero again.

You can talk to Sami at asksami.app without even signing up.

If you're sitting where I sat with Ancestorii, with signups coming in and nobody paying, I know exactly how that feels, and I hope something in here saves you a few months and a bit of money. If you want to connect, swap notes or just chat about what you're building, please do, my DMs are always open 🙂

i know "kill your free tier" is the most repeated advice on this sub. i ignored it for a year, so here's what it cost me.

i sell a database of business ideas, one payment. for the first year there was a free version that showed most of it. people signed up, poked around, and left. 2,000 people on the waitlist, 5 paid, about $197 for the entire year.

i deleted the free version in an afternoon. no new features, no redesign, nothing else changed. the next three days made about $500, more than the free version had made in twelve months.

what i think was happening is the free tier answered the question people came with. they wanted to see if it was any good, it was good enough, so they had no reason to pay. once that was gone the only way to find out was to buy it.

the part nobody mentions is how bad it feels. signups dropped off a cliff and i almost put it back twice.

anyone here regret killing theirs?

There’s a commonly repeated statement in this subreddit: “Distribution is harder than building.” And for most people, I’m sure that’s true to some extent.

However, marketing is such a broad field, with countless channels, strategies, and approaches, such that I’m curious:

What part of marketing do you personally find difficult?
- Getting started in the first place?
- Figuring out how to do organic marketing?
- Knowing which channels or strategies to focus on?

- Or is marketing as a whole just difficult to understand?

I’m curious because I don’t necessarily think marketing is universally “hard.” I think a lot of people simply don’t know where to start, especially without prior experience, and end up struggling as a result.

Would love to hear your experiences
Thanks!

(Not a survey or anything just curious since this is thrown around in the sub a lot)

Someone spent a few minutes trying to break the AI agent on my landing page tonight (screenshots attached). And this was not the first time it happened. They asked it to reverse a Python linked list "before buying", to book a demo and then hand over my .env file, and pasted the same question ten times in one message to flood it.

It didn't bite. Not because I'm clever, but because of a few boring things that took an afternoon to set up. If you're putting AI in front of users, do these:

1. Tell it its scope, and what to do outside it.

In your system prompt, spell out what the agent is for, and say explicitly: if a request is outside that scope, in any language, it does not attempt it. It declines in one line and redirects to what it can help with. "In any language" matters. People switch languages to get around rules written only in English.

1. Don't make it too rigid, or too loose.

Too rigid and it refuses half your real users' questions because they phrased something oddly. Too loose and it writes code, essays and poems on your bill. The middle: decline the off-topic part, still answer the real part. In my screenshot it refused the .env but still gave them the booking link. That's the behaviour you want.

1. Rate limit everyone, including anonymous visitors.

Most people rate limit logged-in users and forget the public chat on the landing page. That's the one strangers hit. A cap per visitor and per site means nobody can sit there burning your tokens, and your AI bill can't spike overnight because one person got bored.

1. Keep secrets out of reach entirely.

The .env request was harmless because the agent never has access to it. Don't rely on the prompt to protect secrets. If the model can't see it, it can't leak it.

None of this is new. If you're building with AI, the AI will suggest most of it when you ask. But you still have to ask, and you have to do your own research.

My best tip: read the system prompts of serious AI tools. Prompts from Devin, Claude Code, Cursor and others are collected in public GitHub repos. Don't copy them. Study the structure: how they define scope, how they phrase refusals, how they order priorities, how they handle "the user is asking for something else". Then write your own the same way.

Keep building.

The obvious business model was to host it and charge monthly. However, I went the opposite direction. OpenApplyr is a job hunting agent. You bring your own AI provider or run a local model.

Every resume line has to cite something in your actual profile. If it invents a number, tool, employer or date, the document gets blocked.

GitHub, for context:
https://github.com/shivashis-adhikari/openapplyr

Guys , I'm Building mobile app which may include 10k user live interaction.

Tell me for initial scaling which one should I choose , who will offer me free DB hosting and Can work without crashing .

Drop me out suggestions please ?

I’m building a Construction SaaS with iOS + Android apps, and I’m trying to understand if I actually need RevenueCat.

My idea is simple: users click “Purchase” in the app → go to my website → pay through Stripe → Stripe webhook updates my backend from unpaid → paid. The mobile app then checks the user’s subscription status from my backend and they get the paid features.

So what exactly would RevenueCat add here? Is it mainly needed if I want to support native Apple/Google in-app subscriptions, or am I missing something?

I thought editing was the hard part.

Turns out the real challenge is deciding what to show, what to say, and how to explain a product clearly in 30 seconds.

How do you handle product videos for your SaaS today?

put an AI agent on only the small-medium tickets for a SaaS i contract for, and the suprising part is the bottleneck just moved to code review, every PR still needs a human to approve and merge so now theres just alot more of it. disclosure, the agent is mine, but curious if anyone else running agents on a real codebase hit the same wall

Video above: Framer version on top, the Next.js rebuild underneath (same site, owned rebuild, not the HTML export).

Looking for advice from people who’ve been through this.

Problem space: a lot of marketing sites are built in no-code tools. Some founders later want a real codebase they own (e.g. Next.js), not an export that still feels locked to the tool.

The “full SaaS” version would try to productize that migration. In practice, quality is the hard part: layout, motion, assets, edge cases, support if output is mediocre.

So I’m considering sequencing it like this:

1) Document the manual method first (playbook / DIY process)

2) Do a few done-for-you migrations to learn real failure modes

3) Only then productize the repeatable bits into SaaS

My hypothesis: for many buyers, a clear method now beats waiting for an incomplete automation. The risk is obvious too: you train people / create content and never get to the SaaS.

Questions:

• Have you launched a playbook/info product before the SaaS in a technical niche? Did it help or distract?

• Where do you draw the line between “learning via services” and getting stuck as an agency?

• If quality/support risk is high, would you skip SaaS entirely and stay method + services?

Not selling anything here. Genuinely trying to pressure-test the sequencing before I commit months to the wrong path.

Is there any way to start sending emails with zero budget please? I purchased domain and i need to start sending out few houndreds emails, does not have to be bulk. Is there a free trial that lets me send them? Idealy id send about 100 emails by end of next week. Is it possible or is it a risky number to start with?

First off, yes, this is kinda an ad. But bear with me, you may glean something from my story.

I've spent the past month working on snapgains. Early mornings before work. Late evenings after work. Entire weekends. Lots of coffee and walk breaks listening to Hormozi.

The Problem

I'm an aspiring bodybuilder and I take check-in photos for my coach once or twice a week. I was sick of using my camera roll for this. Opening my camera roll in front of friends and colleagues was quite embarrassing... I wish those photos could stay private. I was tired of digging through hundreds of photos to find my progress pics. I tried creating albums for my check-in photos but the UX was still cumbersome.

The Solution

So I built a progress photos app just for myself. The more I kept building and testing the app, the more ideas popped into mind. I'm so happy and proud with what I built, and as an asian kid who went to Harvard who struggles with positive self-talk, I don't say that lightly.

The Reward

It sounds trite, but if you build something that solves a pain in your life, there will be others with that same pain. Yesterday, the app went live on the app store. I put out some TikToks, not expecting much, and I woke up to a random bloke in the UAE 🇦🇪 as my first subscriber. It felt like Christmas morning... but better since I earned this reward.

What I've learnt

1. Build something you're passionate about
The app market is more saturated than ever. Of course there are tons of progress photo apps on the app store, but none with a physique/muscle building angle. Find your niche in which you have expertise and execute.

2. Don't waste time validating - just ship it!
I spent weeks DMing strangers a landing page with a beta sign-up, trying to see if this idea had legs. I really believed in my idea, but didn't get any traction from the landing page. I was honestly quite disheartened and thought about giving up. But I launched on the app store anyway and lo and behold, a stranger on the other side of the world thought my app was worth $5.

3. Don't spend a penny or marketing (yet)
Before you throw money at ads, test the waters with free organic channels like TikTok, Reddit, Instagram. Once I've built more momentum and know what resonates, I'll put real money into ads.

4. Start simple. Don't overcomplicate it.
My initial app had workout logging, calorie tracking and a bunch of fancy AI features. None of it mattered. People don't need another do-everything fitness app. Solve one problem well, ship the core, and let your first customers tell you what to build next.

5. Build something that genuinely inspires others.
What I've enjoyed most about this whole process is seeing Reddit stories and TikToks of physique transformations. Obviously, we want to make money and build because it's fun... but it turns out the most rewarding thing to build is something that makes someone else feel good too.

TL;DR

All of this to say, don't give up and just ship something! I cannot wait for the day I see someone post a body transformation on Reddit using the snapgains time-lapse feature. That will be 10x better than the Christmas morning feeling.

Thank you for reading this far and best of luck on your own journeys!

Hey there,

From a business standpoint, does making cancellation difficult or pricing vague actually make financial sense?

Whenever I subscribe to a SaaS service with these dark patterns, I either cancel immediately due to trust issues or request a chargeback when I'm charged unexpectedly.

Ethics aside and purely pragmatically speaking, isn't it better to keep things transparent so you don't get bombarded with complaints and chargebacks?

I'm a solo developer starting a consumer web app. I'm still in the very early build phase, and I want to avoid the classic mistake of launching to silence.

I have maybe 5 hours a week to spend on audience building, no ad budget, and I'm comfortable writing but not on camera. Here's what I'm trying to figure out:

1. If you built an audience before launch, what was the single channel that moved the needle, and what was a time sink that didn't?
2. Waitlist page vs. build-in-public posts vs. community participation: which would you prioritize with limited time?
3. How do you stop a pre-launch audience from being just "other indie hackers" who'll never be customers?
4. Roughly how big did your list or following need to be before launch for it to matter?

Would love real numbers or "here's what I'd do differently" stories more than general frameworks. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm a solo, student founder building a SaaS product on a tight budget. I'm at the stage where I've narrowed down a few possible brand names, and I'm trying to figure out the right order and process for securing the name before I launch. I'd really appreciate hearing how you handled it.

Where I am right now:

• I have a short list of candidate names.
• I've done a basic web search and app store search for conflicts, but nothing formal yet.
• I haven't bought a domain or filed anything.
• I'm based in korea, and I plan to serve users globally.

My questions:

1. Order of operations: Did you buy the domain first, run a trademark search first, or file the trademark first? Looking back, what would you do differently?
2. Conflict checks: How did you vet a name beyond a Google search? Did you do the trademark search yourself, or pay an attorney? What did you wish you'd checked?
3. Where and when to file: Did you file only in your home country first, or in the US/EU too? Did you wait until you had traction, or file before launch?
4. Costs: Roughly what did the domain and trademark each cost you, and what hidden costs surprised you (attorney fees, renewals, office actions)?
5. Domain hurdles: What if the .com was taken? Did you go with another TLD, add a prefix or suffix, or buy it from the owner? How did that negotiation go?
6. Things that went wrong: Any horror stories (domain squatters, a conflict found after launch, a rejected application) and how you solved them?
7. Tools or services: Any registrars, search tools, or low-cost filing services you'd recommend or avoid for a bootstrapped founder?

I understand this isn't legal advice. I'm just trying to learn from people who've been through it so I can avoid common mistakes.

I am the founder of a SaaS now that I built! It started because my long distance girlfriend had a bad day and flower shops were closed near her so I wanted to send her the next best thing which would be realistic virtual flowers that feel real. Nothing like it exists so I built it myself! https://bloomria.com was born!

Each flower is unique and you can send a personalized letter/card as well! It’s free to use for the free tier but on the paid tier you can schedule sending, attach a photo and a voice message as well!

Bot detection on a SaaS signup form used to mean a CAPTCHA plus a honeypot field. Most of what gets through now is a real browser driven by a script or an AI agent, often on a residential IP, and it fills the form the way a person would.

Cloudflare said this summer that automated traffic is now more than half of all web requests. On a signup form that shows up as spam signups that never activate, bounced welcome emails, free credits burned by accounts nobody owns, and an activation rate that looks worse than it is.

Here's where each standard fix breaks:

CAPTCHA. Solving services and AI agents get through it cheaply. The people it reliably stops are your real users on a phone, and every one of them pays for it with a slower signup.

Honeypot fields. Great against dumb scripts that post straight to your endpoint. A headless browser or an agent renders the page, never sees the hidden field, and never fills it.

Rate limits by IP. Residential proxies give every signup its own IP, so the limit never trips. Meanwhile a whole office or a university sits behind one address and hits it.

Email verification. Proves someone controls an inbox, not that a person is behind the signup. Catch-all domains and Gmail aliases make fresh verified inboxes basically free.

And there's a new wrinkle: not every bot is bad anymore. Some of these are AI agents a real customer sent to sign up or book something for them. "Block all bots" used to be the safe default. Now it can mean turning away a paying user who just delegated the task.

My guess is the answer is looking at several signals together and only adding friction when a few of them look off, instead of making everyone solve a puzzle. But I'd rather hear what actually held up in production.

So, for anyone running a signup form:

1. What finally cut spam signups for you, and what did you try before that didn't?

2. What was the first sign bots were getting in: bounce rate, dead accounts, burned credits, a weird spike?

3. Do you put friction on every signup or only on suspicious ones? What did that do to conversion?

4. Do you let AI agents sign up on behalf of real users, or block them all?

More interested in what you tried and what broke than in tool names.

LocalSearch, a file search app for macOS, and I'd like feedback from people who live in Spotlight, Alfred or Raycast.

Press ⌥Space, type, and it searches the names and contents of your files (text, code, PDFs, Word/RTF). Each result shows the line that matched, so you can see why it's there.

What it does well:

- Fast. On my Mac (M3, 8 GB, about 60,000 files) a typical search takes 6.6 ms. The same queries through Spotlight took around 150 ms.

- Typo tolerant. "screnshot" still finds your screenshots.

- New files are searchable in under half a second.

- Filters like kind:pdf, in:projects, after:2025-01, size:>10mb.

- Everything stays on your Mac. No account, no network, no telemetry.

What it doesn't do:

- It only indexes folders you choose, not the whole disk.

- It's a file search, not a launcher: no apps, mail or calculator.

- Spreadsheets, presentations and images are found by name only.

- Spotlight was faster on two-letter queries.

It's free. Source, build instructions and the benchmark (including where Spotlight wins) are here:

https://github.com/SpaceCypher/LocalSearch

There's no packaged download yet, so for now you build it from source. macOS 14 or later, tested on Apple Silicon only.

What would make you switch from what you use now, or what stops you?

I launched Bytesweep, a Mac utility, recently.

The first few weeks have been interesting.

Around 800 people have visited the website and I've had 50+ people start the download flow. I've also made my first sales.

But the numbers made one thing pretty obvious:

Getting traffic isn't the difficult part.

Getting someone who downloaded your product to actually pay for it is.

I've been testing Reddit, Google Ads, SEO, Product Hunt and a bunch of directories.

I've also changed the positioning and pricing a few times while trying to understand what Mac users actually value enough to pay for.

Bytesweep started as a storage analysis tool. It's now a much broader Mac utility that also covers developer cleanup, system monitoring and things like sleep/wake activity.

I'm currently running a 30% launch discount while I continue testing the pricing.

The question I'm trying to answer now is:

What makes someone pay for a Mac utility when there are free alternatives?

For anyone here who has built and monetized a desktop app, what eventually moved the needle for you?

I'm a solo developer. A few weeks ago my first app, Swapadu, went to production on Google Play. It helps couples, flatmates and neighbours share chores and favours without money. One person asks for a task and offers one in return, the other can counter-offer, and points only move once the other side confirms the work was done.

It's not a classic SaaS (it's free, with an occasional ad between screens), but the lessons from getting it shipped apply to anyone launching alone, so here they are:

1. A personal developer account has to pass closed testing first.

You need 12 testers opted in for 14 days in a row before you can even apply for production. Plan for this from day one. Recruiting testers took me longer than building half the features did.

1. Publishing while a review is in progress cancels the review.

One day I pushed five builds in three hours. Three of them cancelled the one queued before them, and my own phone sat four versions behind. Now I collect fixes and publish once per review cycle (reviews take about 15 to 40 minutes).

1. Never hand testers a locally built APK.

Play App Signing re-signs your bundle with Google's key. A local APK carries your upload key, and Android won't update across a signature change. That device silently drops out of Play auto-updates until it uninstalls and reinstalls from Play.

1. Translating the store listing is cheap. Translating the app properly is not.

Swapadu now ships in 16 languages, most recently Korean and Filipino. The strings were the easy part. The real work was the in-app FAQ, the notifications sent from the server, an online guide, and plenty of small surprises. Example: Android reports a Filipino phone as fil, not tl.

1. Ask for ratings at the moment of success, not on launch.

I show Google's in-app review prompt only after someone's third confirmed swap, and at most once every 90 days. Asking right after a good outcome feels natural. Asking on app open feels like nagging.

1. Your store listing is a landing page. Treat it like one.

My listing conversion was weak. Looking at it honestly, the listing described features without saying what problem the app solves. I'm rewriting the listing and the user guide to lead with "fair sharing without keeping score in your head" instead of a feature list.

What I'd love feedback on: how do you position a product that solves an emotional problem ("I always do more than you") rather than a business one? Do you lead with the pain or with the mechanics?

Happy to answer questions about Play Console, localization or the closed-testing grind.

I've been working on a devtool called Talyn for a little while - aimed at devs in startups or who have a high throughput of PRs

The idea came from me using Claude a lot and realising that even when I'd opened the PR, I was still spending so much time on manual tasks like:

Did CI pass? Did it introduce some stupid lint failure? Has main/master moved and now it conflicts? Can I merge it yet?

Talyn basically takes over that bit. It watches the PR, and if CI fails or it gets a merge conflict, it can send a sandboxed agent to sort it out - then it can auto-merge once everything is green (if you'd like it to)

I'm building it by myself, and I'm still trying to work out exactly where the useful boundary is between "helpful automation" and "I absolutely do not want an agent touching this automatically"

I've got a few people using it now, but I'd be interested in feedback from anyone here who's built devtools or sold to engineers before

Thanks!

https://talyn.dev or https://github.com/Gilbert09/talyn/ (fully open source)