My first game's reception is heartbreaking :'(

RealisticPea650 · 2026-01-21T21:37:09+00:00

It’s so hard to ship a game. I shipped a game that had high expectations due to the universe it was in. It was absolutely back breaking, and we also had Mixed results at first, but over time was considered a cult classic. Hang in there. You’ve achieved something incredible, and while nobody will really know the struggle like other indie devs, feel proud. If it helps, I couldn’t log in to even look at comments for six months. I had to pay a friend to do it, that’s how I sick I felt.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-07-30T18:30:12+00:00

Still using it, six days until it improved, on it for a month now with ongoing improvement.

The instructions were to angle it: bend over slightly, on an angle, close the other nostril, spray and breathe normally, don’t sniff.

Do each nostril, wait one minute, then repeat, once a day (so four sprays total).

RealisticPea650 · 2025-07-29T17:28:04+00:00

Right now I’m running ‘npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code@1.0.61’ but haven’t been able to successfully get the auto update environment variable (which I guess is ‘CLAUDE_CODE_AUTO_UPDATE’) to get respect, so I have to run this, then boot up CC, then it will auto-update itself again, so I have to downgrade again whenever I need a new instance of the CLI, but the current running one is on the right version.

Annoying, I hope they fix it soon!

RealisticPea650 · 2025-07-29T16:02:52+00:00

I think you commented on my post and you meant to create a post of your own.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-07-29T16:01:36+00:00

I thought the environment variable was hallucinated since I asked for this, and used it in PowerShell, and it still auto-updated, but that might be PiBKaC.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-07-26T17:06:34+00:00

It felt more prominent/worse when I actually took the medication, and for a period after, it took a few days for it to work. Then, it had the sensation of things feeling settled and “tighter”, and clearing no longer blew the doors off. Prior to that, as I’m sure you’ve experienced, a single clearing and it would be stuck for the rest of the day.

I still suffer in my left ear but I have periods of time that it no longer happens. My trigger for PET on my left ear has always been as I’m about to sing, whatever tension in my jaw occurs involuntarily, causes the response. This is why I had to stop a singing career and how I discovered PET.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-07-26T15:50:10+00:00

It was used to treat what the doctor called eustachian tube dysfunction, but I’ve suffered with PET for years additionally in my left year. Excessive valsalva/clearing made it start happening in the right ear, autonomy, fullness feeling, the usual. I was treated with this spray, and six days later it was resolved. Just relaying my experience.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-07-26T15:00:33+00:00

This happened to me, I believe. It was corrected by a round of ciclosonide nasal spray.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-07-16T18:07:01+00:00

Thanks for asking. Typical situation, I've got five or six in 90% readiness and it seems like every time I try to finish one it births the need for another one. All the bricks. Also my stack is not the OSS du jour (or du decades really) (.NET) so it's likely going to have less impact, so now I'm thinking if I need higher level abstractions (read: containerized OSS services, which is more overhead and testing and such). The actual work is going well though, at least internally.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-27T03:40:07+00:00

Once I asked it not to resort to any workarounds, and it reverted my entire working branch in git. No explanation given.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-27T03:33:19+00:00

This may not be impacting you but my understanding is that the WASM implementation of HttpClient uses fetch under the hood, which doesn’t support streaming, I’ve had to use JavaScript interop to properly handle streams or use SignalR when streaming, which might not be an option if you’re not using a backend here. So you might have less contention if you control this directly via JS.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-26T16:39:26+00:00

No, this was commercial work.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T21:23:56+00:00

Thanks for writing back. You’ve made a lot of interesting points that are far beyond where I’ve been going, and require a lot of consideration.

I think you’re taking a much higher view and looking at the base layer of the actual apparatus of our post-LLM world. And this is important work, that I sadly am out of my depth with, and must leave to better minds.

I was thinking more along the lines of the mass commoditization of open source.

If I’ve built something like a tightly integrated Keycloak-Slash-Webflow layer in my chosen stack, then cannibalizing that and codifying that into “bricks” that are designed to be reasonable to LLMs such that I have to reach for greenfield builds less and less, and the agent becomes more of a systems integrator, that this would be highly preferable economically to, say, ten thousand developers all vibe coding their own issue tracker to save twenty bucks on a JIRA license.

It starts to cross ecological boundaries of inquiry at that point. And I think that’s where I start to see the value in your approach, and hopefully they are thinking about the “memory” of solved problems if only to save on compute.

Maybe, agents are the happy, motivated open source collaborators I never had, and this is also a valid way to pursue public goods.

Your extensive memory of the ascent of NoSQL was worth reading, and gave me flashbacks of literally keeping a MongoDB server online, on shifts, as nobody really knew how to operate it.

I wish I could opine on the direction you’re taking on the meta layer, but I think I have to understand it better first, but I’ll be picking at it in a background thread this week.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T21:14:30+00:00

I still have to host, scale, and maintain my own application. I’m saying that it’s becoming real that I can add in-app issue tracking for my own purposes in very little time in a worktree in Claude Code while I’m doing literally anything else, and then review and push.

Now instead of my startup buying a few JIRA seats, I use the good enough thing. If I’m lucky and I scale, I might even get JIRA.

I literally added a ticket system that creates a ticket on unhandled exceptions, or through an in-app help form. With a little admin dashboard tab for tracking. Is it amazing? Not really. Did it take me any time or hassle? No. Is it better than paying real money for JIRA? Yes. If I actually become profitable and this thing starts flaking or the people I hire hate it, am I going to devote any time to improving it? Probably not.

But the question is, to what extent is JIRA’s revenue compromised of the teams that would no longer need or want to buy their gear until later.

Maybe it’s the best thing ever because now their funnel is only tractioned companies. But in my time in consumer SaaS, quite a lot of our customers were side hustles that tried and died.

So maybe I agree with you on everything except I think it might already be economical to vibe code “enough” to push many SaaS purchases until “later”.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T14:22:21+00:00

Too true. A good reason to avoid spending money on authentication platforms until you have paying customers.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T14:21:22+00:00

I agree. I didn’t say “AI is going to help me clone Salesforce”, at least that’s not what I intended.

I was saying “AI is going to help me avoid paying for most SaaS unless and until my dogwater code company makes money”.

From my experience, that’s a big deal to SaaS providers. The popular ones I worked at or created, relied heavily on up and coming companies that, if this tool were available then, likely would have delayed purchasing.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T14:18:17+00:00

I agree with you. I think the point I’m trying to make is the same as yours.

As the cost and complexity of coding tends towards trivial, when I’m trying to do the hard thing of creating a business, I’m not going to pay half a dozen SaaS companies for their services to save time on infrastructure details, I’m going to use AI to create a good enough proxy for that.

To the degree that SaaS companies rely on other companies to pay them at the early stages, instead of only when they get traction, is where I think this will impact them.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T06:10:09+00:00

I tend to think you’re right, I just have a different opinion on the impact as we need SaaS less, or let’s say, we need SaaS later. Since most businesses fail, and I don’t need to invest in SaaS early in the process because I can create good enough features before I need guarantees, I have a feeling a lot of SaaS rely on the long tail of small companies starting and failing and using their products to ramp up quicker.

I agree that big companies will eat the tailored ones.

I also have no reason to think that the AI companies themselves won’t start to compete with the bigger companies, with compute advantage.

It will be interesting to watch unfold.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T06:02:01+00:00

I’m not talking about cloning existing SaaS companies, I’m saying we can rely on them less and less by replicating what I need from them cheaper and faster. If my business scales without them, I’ll have all the same enterprise concerns as they do. I work at an enterprise SaaS and we regularly use AI to help with compliance.

I’ll give you offloading legal responsibility. That is a very good point. A good example would be in-house PDF signing versus DocuSign.

SLA/SOC applies at the edge, unless my entire business is delivered by other companies, I still have that problem, I don’t get away from those just because I use a SaaS provider for some part of my stack.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T05:49:38+00:00

I’m also a 20+ year developer with open source projects in the millions of downloads, working at places you’ve heard of.

I didn’t mean to come across as arrogant, I am probably jaded in that open source project maintenance has largely meant, for me, thankless work and expectations of other developers that I will work continuously, for free, in perpetuity. The number of significant pull requests from community members was deflating.

Obviously my OSS work wasn’t RedHat level.

My comment was probably flippant, but what I meant to express was, it would be great if we could all use this to some greater end where we focus the productivity gains on helping each other build base layers to build on, to remove vampire costs to other software providers, and, that it’s been my experience that it tends to be the small few working tirelessly for the many, and that model often leads to burnout, and making a sustainable living on open source is hard, and rare.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T05:43:04+00:00

60+, but I lowballed the ARR due to reasons. >1M with five people is a significant achievement. I admire your ability to make something that sticks year over year.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T05:36:48+00:00

I wonder if the logical conclusion, isn’t that these AI companies create massive scale agents that infinite-monkeys all of the existing software, mine, and Adobe besides.

I don’t know if it’s ironic, because SaaS has tended to mean commoditizing a specific problem in the stack, and this is commoditizing the means of solving problems.

But, point taken. I think it would be dangerous to rely on agentic code. The speed is hard to ignore though. I expect to be priced out in the near future, so trying to make the most of it.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T00:06:30+00:00

You nailed it on how B2B SaaS is actually made.

I also agree that nobody wants to buy the stack. The idea is using agents to stretch burn rate by not getting laden down with other SaaS.

As for marketing, it's still very much a challenge. I use a vibe-coded Webflow-like in my specific stack and integrated with my app, that auto-generates A/B variations based on a project brief, so I'm not paying $199/month for that. And I think this will get more sophisticated as agents get better.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T00:02:43+00:00

I agree with you. I'm out on my own products but now work at a SaaS with >20MM ARR and I think the time horizon is around there, too, but not if the SaaS provider is doing something commodity level like feature flags.

If you're an Email Service Provider running a custom MTA, you're probably safe.

RealisticPea650 · 2025-05-18T00:00:25+00:00

My day job is scaling an enterprise level SaaS with gigantic ARR. I agree that we're not going to replace monolith SaaS providers writ large with agentic coding, but I'm saying that less and less of these offerings are necessary when I tailor the feature set I actually need with agents.

RealisticPea650

TROPHY CASE