CodeSaas

Developers debugging an unfamiliar error follow a predictable ritual: paste the stack trace into a search engine, open six tabs, and hope one of them describes the same situation. CodeSaas was an attempt to compress that into a single step — paste the error, get a contextual explanation and a likely fix.

The MVP launched deliberately narrow. One input, one output, no accounts, no settings, no dashboard. The only question worth answering was whether developers would use it more than once, and none of the surrounding product surface helped answer that.

It reached 10,000 users within two months of launch — enough signal to know the problem was real without having spent months building infrastructure for a product that might not have found an audience.

Bun and Hono were chosen for cold-start latency. For a tool where the entire value proposition is being faster than opening six browser tabs, response time is the product — a slow version of this idea is not a worse product, it is not a product at all.

Model inference ran through HuggingFace rather than a single proprietary provider, keeping per-request cost low enough that an unmonetised MVP could absorb sudden traffic without the bill becoming the reason to shut it down.

The project validated demand and then hit the limit that catches most developer tools: strong usage, weak willingness to pay, in a category where the incumbents were shipping the same capability into products developers already had open.

I archived it rather than sustaining it out of attachment. The genuinely valuable output was the pattern — ship the narrowest version that can answer the real question, and let the answer decide what happens next. Every project since has been scoped that way.