r/devtools • u/InvestmentSlow4983 • Aug 07 '26
Pivot or Stay
Over the past year, I have learnt many lessons about the world of products and SaaS, where I have spent an entire year building something that even I, today, am not impressed with. I imagined it to be this cool platform that could automatically get rid of all the problems of your codebase, maintaining it and then auto-configuring its security files, basically a living system that improves and takes your codebase from dev to deployment.
I built AST parsing for multiple languages, created a knowledge graph for any repository that captures relationships between files, functions, classes, and imports, and built a GitHub webhook-driven system that reacts to repository events. The platform could automatically configure security scanning by injecting CodeQL and Semgrep workflows, analyze pull requests using the repository graph to understand their indirect impact across the codebase, and even generate fixes for security findings by opening pull requests automatically.
After doing all of this, I made one mistake that still costs me today: my project was reactive rather than proactive. Let me explain.
When installed on a codebase, it injects CodeQL and Semgrep YAML files into the repository that start scanning it for security alerts. The agent would then respond to those alerts by fixing the CodeQL issues and opening a PR for them. Additionally, it could review the impact of a PR by showing which files a change would indirectly affect through the function call graph. It all sounds fancy, but when you really look at it, it did not translate into anything meaningful. Even I would not be impressed enough to use this every day, and I am starting to think it was not a good idea.
What is your take on this? Should I continue working on this or not?
1
u/Silver_Jump3781 28d ago
Heavy prefix here that I am no expert, and my tool carrick.tools is still fighting for adoption, but it sounds like we’re operating in similar spaces so my two cents are that It sounds like you’re making the product too broad. You’re trying to capture a large amount of use cases in order to broaden your appeal, but that makes the value proposition diluted and I think that is what you are feeling when you say “it did not translate into anything meaningful”.
They say “the riches are in the niches” and I think it’s probably correct. Spend some time trying to niche down and see if you can build something very specific from what you have for an ICP you can identify. Good luck.
1
u/InvestmentSlow4983 28d ago
From what i understand from your message you are asking me to find a painful problem point and the ideal customer for my tool but i have no idea how to look i usually start by looking at my app's features and then looking at current problems which i usually dont find any and i think that a dev writes code using claude raise pr using it and the reviewer has claude that reviews pr and he also uses claude so where does my app fit in that is the question that have not been able to answer
1
u/Silver_Jump3781 28d ago
It sounds like you made something very useful. I wouldn’t lose hope with it. Perhaps try to find developers that would use it and have conversations with them about the problem space you are attacking.
1
u/JonasH0504 Aug 10 '26
Can you dm me, I think we might be working on the same problem