101 Days of Building in Public, Measured in Code, Users, and Mistakes
101 days from first prompt to both app stores: 873 commits, 790 pull requests, 109 accounts, zero revenue. The numbers from building in public, unrounded.
The fishing app development took 101 days, with one owner and one collaborator on design and the website. Two AI coding agents worked simultaneously in the same repository. The final article in the series covered numbers, both flattering and ones the author would rather round up. The app was built using 873 commits and 790 merged pull requests, with 134 release tags divided between the app and API.
The fish encyclopedia contained 2,939 species, with 2,490 also having habitat-style illustrations. There were 49 preservation anchors, rules in the repo that an AI agent must never simplify away.
The project measured effort through various numbers, but not user engagement. Among the 40 store screenshots, 134 problems were found, including a composited home-indicator bar covering a venomous-fish safety note. The author's points ledger had errors, including a floor in the code that clawed back points from fraudulent catches. This issue was not fixed due to the anchor rule. After the App Store version launch, the author's X account was suspended for posting through browser automation, which violated X's rules.
Only 109 accounts existed in the app, with 90 excluded from the metrics due to inactivity. Weekly active users were zero for five consecutive weeks. The app had zero revenue. The author acknowledged being wrong in public on several occasions, correcting mistakes such as the main point of a specific article and the number of rows in a ledger.
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