Project status: shipping

Building in public. Shipping tools developers actually use.

Open source developer tools that solve annoying, real-world problems. All open source. All shipped.

The checkmarks:

  • ✓ build useful tools
  • ✓ ship early, ship often
  • ✓ solving problems developers hate

The era of the vibe coder

Everyone’s talking about it like it’s new. I’ve been one since MySpace.

  1. Tom was your first friend. Your profile was a blank canvas, tools were HTML/CSS/inline JavaScript. We didn’t call it vibe coding. Called it “messing with my profile.” Same loop: type stuff, see what happens, ship, repeat.

I never left. The tools changed — Flash → jQuery → Rails → Node → React → AI. The loop didn’t. Type, ship, repeat. The difference between 2003 and 2026 is the speed, not the act.

What changed

The advantage finally compounded.

For twenty years, vibe coding meant writing 200 lines to ship a 50-line idea. Now it’s 5 lines to ship 500. The ratio flipped. Anyone who could always see the shape of the thing in their head can now get it out fast enough that the gap between idea and artifact collapses.

What didn’t change: judgment. The winners of this era aren’t the new entrants. They’re the ones who’ve been doing it long enough to know what to ship and what to throw away. The tools accelerated; the taste didn’t.

What’s on the bench

Five packages and plugins shipped, all MIT, all open source:

  • Curtis AI Chat — Obsidian community plugin. Polyglot AI chat with 30+ providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, OpenRouter, Groq, and more), image attachments, long-term memory, slash commands, and inline actions — all inside Obsidian.
  • curtis-compliance — npm i @jordannewell/curtis-compliance. Automated compliance checks for fintech code. Pre-commit gate, PR review, audit logging. HIPAA / SOC 2 / PCI-DSS.
  • temporal-git — npm i temporal-git. Find which commit introduced a bug with one command. Git bisect, but actually usable.
  • harbormasterd — pip install harbormasterd. Zero-conf port management with automatic HTTPS + DNS for local development.
  • crypto-key-classifier — pip install crypto-key-classifier. Identify crypto keys across BTC, ETH, SOL, and more with aggressive recovery.

Five packages and plugins shipped. 100% open source MIT licensed. Weekly active releases and improvements.

Honest gap

In this era, my public-facing list is short. Real software. Real users. But small compared to people who’ve been publishing for ten straight years.

The in-between years went into private work, into ventures that didn’t get a launch post, into tools that ran inside companies and never saw a README. Not a defense. The reason for what comes next.

The play

You use it. break it, make it better.

No phase. No pad. No “coming soon” posts about what’s going to be built. Just artifacts, source, receipts.

  1. Ship in public. Every release, every commit, every post. Public by default.
  2. Write as I work. Field notes, not launch announcements.
  3. Build the catalog. The list gets longer. The portfolio gets real.

Just getting started

The era is the vibe coder’s. The opportunity is for the people who’ve been doing it long enough to know the difference between shipping and talking. That’s the bet.

This is just the beginning. More ideas. More tools. More solving.

Building in public. Follow the journey.

Building in public. Shipping tools developers actually use.

If you made it this far, I appreciate it. — JN