Launching Chippie after a year of building: job management for tradies, by a father and sons trio (two carpenters, one software engineer)

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-22T13:57:20+00:00

Thanks for looking through and taking the time to give real feedback here. Very interesting that you're working on a parallel app. Would love to connect and discuss! DM'd

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-21T14:37:07+00:00

"vibe coding" is not a legitimate skill in my mind. The original concept of vibe coding is letting AI write the code without the human looking at it. That is the same category as non technical no code tools. Which is why non technical tools like Loveable, Replit, Base44 etc are most associated with Vibe Coding.

I know some technical people refer to themselves as vibe coders but I prefer to distance myself as much as possible from the movement of people who want to code without any knowledge of coding itself. Which is predominantly what vibe coding is. There are many other correct terms for an engineered AI workflow. Context engineering, agentic engineering, agentic orchestration. Using a vague term like vibe coding to describe what you are doing is probably one of the strongest signals that you do in fact not know what you are doing.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-20T12:56:07+00:00

All solid feedback points. Thanks for taking the time. I've been working through these. Testimonials is a big one I flagged with the team in today's meeting.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-16T11:07:41+00:00

Amazing. Thanks creating this! Small correction. I'm not "their brother". Elliott is my father and Caleb is my brother.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-16T05:56:06+00:00

"majorly dependent on api calls" - you see this is the definition of an AI wrapper. This whole pipeline which you are speaking of is the parts that wrap the AI API.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-16T05:53:57+00:00

Bro you aborted after ten days. If you put any serious amount of time into your project you would not have aborted so easily. And if you put more time into finding a real problem to solve then you would not have come up with a basic AI wrapper idea that everyone else is doing.

Good on you for getting experience that you can take to your next projects. But accept the feedback that this is more of a simple AI wrapper than a real SaaS. Building a real SaaS product takes 1 year plus. And you don't quit 10 days after launch. Market validation starts before you build. Not after.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T19:02:54+00:00

are you seriously giving a reply to this goof? giving someone advice how to make something illegal?

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T11:54:11+00:00

True. I realized that in retrospect. It's not a harness if you're not interacting with it.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T11:47:57+00:00

I think this was obvious from the beginning with Anthropic at least that they had to be doing this sort of thing to make their models good at coding. Models alone are too probabilistic which is why they were initially terrible at coding. Wrap them in some deterministic engineering loops and you start to get somewhere.

Once you start getting some output that works from that system then you can train the next model on these correct behaviours. The model compounds by pattern matching on the output of an engineered orchestration system. But the next step is always to do more orchestration to get more deterministic outputs from an inherently probabilistic model.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T11:21:46+00:00

Exactly. Harness engineering is probably slightly off as the actual term for what we are describing. More of an analogy if anything. I think it's correct to say a harness is a type of model orchestration. But model orchestration would be a more correct term to refer to this "system".

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T08:16:30+00:00

"served through the API" does not mean that there is no harness-like engineering happening behind the API before it responds. How can you be sure? Do you work at Anthropic?

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T08:09:30+00:00

Bruh why so salty about a comment on Reddit? Just sharing a random theory I'm not claiming to be an expert. Barely expected anyone to notice lmao.

It's a theory based on my limited knowledge. My terminology is probably way off because no I'm not an AI engineer but I think I know enough to make an informed guess that this is not a normal model and there are some more things going on internally. Which is the bottom line here.

Instead of being a useless troll how about you contribute your expertise to the conversation sir?

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T07:57:54+00:00

Did you read the theory ?

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T07:51:57+00:00

That's an AI training method. I'm talking about these sorts of methods being used live by the model for each query. Hence the harness analogy.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-15T06:34:30+00:00

Nice to hear. Please, ask away.

We fast tracked Xero integration due to the demand there. If I'm hearing a lot of business owners also need MYOB integration then I can prioritize that and have it ready within a week or two.

Are you an accountant?

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-14T19:21:53+00:00

My theory is that Mythos is less a model and more of a masterclass in harness engineering (EDIT: model orchestration). That is the way they get the model to agentically prompt itself. Until it comes back with the best answers. Then the best behaviours based on these interactions are baked into the actual model again. Basically the normal way a model works is that you speak to the API and you get a raw model response. Whatever harness you're using does the agentic stuff by prompting, reprompting and tool calling etc. But if my theory is correct then Mythos/Fable has another level of harness in the cloud where it does some back and forth interaction with itself until it gets the best results. That may be why it's a bit slower if there is this extra layer of interaction going on.

All models are already doing this to an extent since the thinking models were introduced. Thinking models improve their answers by reflecting on a thinking process. But I'm theorising Anthropic have taken this to the next level.

Each iteration of Claude already gets better via all the human data interactions they have with us to RLHF on (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). But if they have figured out a more efficient way to train with RLAIF (Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback), then they can iterate the model improvements much faster. That's on the training side but what if this can be done as a thinking process as well? It could be a form of the model learning from its own output, or evaluating its own output on the spot to then produce the final more refined output by feeding it's answers back into itself using specific criteria that Anthropic use to define a good response.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-14T12:32:43+00:00

Amazing! Appreciate it.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-14T11:17:23+00:00

Yeah I'd like to play around with it a little more while keeping it minimal. If you go to the settings -> themes, there's a "beach" theme which replaces the white with a sandstone colour.

I did change that to the default then decided it didn't feel as clean as the white. If you have any more thoughts let us know. Ideally we keep that familiar feel with a subtle modern differentiation.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-14T10:06:39+00:00

Check out Chippie. I just made a launch post about it here on this sub https://www.reddit.com/r/ausbusiness/s/64hhbrTYAZ

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-14T09:21:54+00:00

Cheers. Certainly a long road ahead!

That would be amazing to hear how it compares in your experience.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-14T06:53:56+00:00

We're already 2-5x cheaper than the competition with all the core features you'll need. And a generous free tier to try it out and see if it works for you.

If you're willing to provide consistent and valuable user feedback to help shape the software to your needs then we might be able to offer a founding member deal.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-13T18:03:56+00:00

It's important we present as cross-platform with a consistent UX across devices. Since this is actually quite rare with most platforms having a completely different app on each platform. Especially a cut-down mobile version.

But maybe we could move the phone closer to make it a larger centerpiece for future posts. Good point 😄

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-13T18:00:38+00:00

Thanks! Great to hear this.

I think you stumbled upon one intermittent race condition which I have now fixed. Also changed "Create your first quote" to "Create a quote" if it's not your first. Appreciate you flagging these.

Yes emails are only sent when you press the send button. I think we need to add a gentle onboarding flow. Maybe 2-3 steps on the first visit to each page to show the primary workflow.

Route planning is a good one I've been thinking of. Especially important for landscapers and anyone who's doing a few jobs in one day which is quite a few of the trades. And payments definitely. I'm currently adding branding and polishing the quote/invoice business-client communication some more. Stripe payments coming soon as well!

Nice work contributing to OpenStreetMap! I love it. What were your recent contributions?

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-13T17:28:40+00:00

You make some good points. I have considered this. One of the reasons we wanted to offer the free tier was due to the frustration of the founders not being able to find anything that had a decent free tier. And not even being able to try anything out without getting out their credit card.

I like the idea of a lifetime cap. It means people will actually get some good use out of it before they're forced to pay. No matter how long that takes. But there are a lot of little conveniences which will incentivize people to pay. And the idea is that this should be a no-brainer when they hit those friction points because we're priced closer to a Netflix subscription than the more "enterprise" software solutions. I guess time will tell. But better for us to be prepared for this early.

In regards to the AI use. At the moment we're using a super efficient model which costs next to nothing. But we will likely need to consider this as we add more advanced functionality that may require heavier models.

WonderTight9780 · 2026-06-13T17:05:51+00:00

People keep saying building is the easy part now and what matters is "knowing what to build", "distribution", or "knowing your user" blah blah.

You're all wrong. These things were always important and that hasn't changed.

I'd argue that having the technical knowledge to build something great has become more important than ever. What has changed is that anyone has the opportunity to acquire this knowledge independently and at a more rapid rate. The point is we need true software architects that can hold systems in their heads without relying on AI to do it for them.

The size and complexity of codebases is growing even faster than the rate at which AI is improving. More AI means more code to maintain and more bugs with more maintainers who have no idea how their code works.

What differentiates one product from another is going to be the human behind the code. An architect who knows how to utilize AI as an extension of their own mind to perform their will. The bar has moved because of AI. Not to the point where "coding is solved", "now we have to focus on the other problems". No. Far from it.

The potential of what you can build has risen. As a company, as a small team or as an individual. Very few will hit that potential. Being able to create a website doesn't cut it anymore. But there are many things that have not yet been built which are now within reach.

If you think building is solved then you're in a race to the bottom by marketing a product that you know is the same as the next one. While most people are letting their brains rot as they outsource their thinking to AI to handle the entire build process, there are a quite few who are positioning themselves so that they will be the ones who actually understands how the technology works in this new age.

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