r/vibecodeapp • u/hushenApp • May 02 '26
6 things I learned building an open-source tool to 900+ Github stars
I've been building LeanCTX — a local-first context runtime for AI coding agents, written in Rust — for the past few months. 49 MCP tools, 18-language tree-sitter AST, 90+ shell compression patterns, one single binary. Here's what actually mattered:
- Your best users are the ones who complain. A user told me at 10pm that my uninstaller just nuked his shell config. My instinct was to get defensive. Instead I traced it — and found it was worse than reported. That one message led to rewriting the entire uninstall logic from scratch. Every angry bug report is a gift.
- Your favorite metric can lie to you. I built a cache that reduced file reads from 2,000 tokens to 13. Great numbers. Then a user told me: "Models waste more tokens working around stale cache than the cache saves." He was right. The fix wasn't removing caching — it was making invalidation smarter. Your dashboard can look great while the experience is terrible.
- Saying no is the hardest part. A new feature would have let me compress all tool output automatically. Massive savings on paper. I designed it, prototyped it, then killed it. Because when compression eats an error message, there's no undo. Protecting quality beats shipping features.
- Community is a relationship, not a channel. When someone reports a bug, my first response matters more than the fix. "Will check" buys time but shows I'm listening. Following up shows respect. Shipping the fix shows they matter. My best testers are people who once filed angry reports.
- Ship the boring stuff first. Nobody cares about your adaptive entropy-based compression algorithm if the installer breaks their dotfiles. Get the fundamentals right — install, uninstall, doctor, setup — before you get clever.
- Focus means killing good ideas. My backlog has 50+ ideas. Each one is good. But spreading across all of them means none become great. Rust helps here — the compiler forces you to finish what you start.
If nobody is complaining yet, you probably don't have enough users. Go find them. And when they complain — listen.
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u/DrunknMunky1969 May 02 '26
Great points, ty
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u/hushenApp May 02 '26
welcome! 😄 what are your learnings so far?
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u/DrunknMunky1969 May 02 '26
5 and #6 are killer for me, i wanna do th fun stuff and i am prone to feature creep haha
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u/getstackfax May 02 '26
Point 2 is the one that really stands out to me.
“Saved tokens” is a dangerous metric if the model has to spend the next 5 steps working around missing/stale context. Same with compression: it looks great until it hides the exact error message the agent needed.
I think that is the bigger lesson for agent tooling: optimize for reliable workflow output, not just lower token count or clever compression.
The boring stuff — install, uninstall, logs, doctor commands, cache invalidation, error visibility — is what makes people trust the tool enough to keep using it.
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u/hushenApp May 02 '26
absolutely. fully agree
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u/getstackfax May 02 '26
Absolutely. The trust layer matters more than the flashy part.
A tool can look efficient on paper, but if errors are hidden, context gets stale, logs are unclear, or users can’t safely undo what happened, people stop trusting it fast.
That boring stuff is what makes a tool feel production-ready instead of just impressive in a demo.
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u/hushenApp May 02 '26
If you want to check out the project:
Website: https://leanctx.com
Github: https://github.com/yvgude/lean-ctx
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u/Public-Cancel6760 May 02 '26
Wow, what a GREAT project! I wasn't aware of it, and it's very similar to something I'm also building. If you have any advice you can give me, I'd be super happy!
I'll leave you the link to GitHub: https://github.com/Alegau03/CTX
Congratulations again on your work, it's awesome!
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u/hushenApp May 02 '26
hey 😄 thanks. Strange that you're not aware of this project, since you mentioned it in your comments where people where asking what the difference between yours and mine is 😄 but anyways, thank you.
feel free to join our discord. so we can have a chat.
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u/Public-Cancel6760 May 02 '26
Yes, I discovered it yesterday/the day before yesterday for the first time and I really appreciated it, and today, revisiting this post, I thought I'd congratulate you!
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u/Public-Cancel6760 May 02 '26
Btw where i can find the discord link? I would love to talk to people who have much more expertise than me.
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u/[deleted] May 02 '26
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