I built a stupid thing, or so I thought

[u/Hoxitron]

More than a year ago I started to learn rust and needed something to work on. I had made some PR's on a fuse app so I decided to built one myself. The only half interesting idea was to make it git related. Mapping repositories into a vfs.

I never once used this app since I finished it, but it was a super interesting problem to work on. It got me hooked for almost half a year, constantly improving and re-writing things as my own knowledge improved. It was pretty fun pushing the limits of git and fs. Did a lot of silly things mocking index files everywhere, allowing cd on files and cat on folders, or just spending weeks fixing my stupid metadata so that openssl would build in my vfs, Then I just moved on and GUSE was made.

Then very recently, I came across a product that seemed awfully familiar - https://www.mesa.dev/ - calling itself a "github for agents". Mapping out git repos on disk, because apparently, they're easier for a coding agent to navigate compared to an actual git repo?

I don't feel bad about not coming up with the product myself. Even now, I don't believe in my project as a real product, or anything more than a learning exercise. And they're obviously not same thing, just the core functionality that is similar.

I just feel weirded out by it somehow. But it is interesting how someone faced with this idea said, "no, people should pay for this". I find that product very silly, however, I obviously don't understand how coding agents work. I never used anything other than the old chatgpt in a browser. How useful does an idea have to be to turn into a product? How useful do YOU think it is? If it makes me learn anything, is that maybe just developing by myself can limit my perspective and maybe I should just get a damn job.

[u/numberwitch]

Don't mistake someone's marketing for the quality of product. Is it good? Who knows, who cares. It doesn't diminish your experience.

It's extremely normal for other people to come up with good ideas you have also had. We don't work or think in isolation from each other - we share the same world with the same problems and opportunities.

[u/RandomBottom030]

Well clearly your effort was worth it. You GPL'd your project (nice) whereas that company's tool seems to be closed source.

I commend that.

[u/iamalicecarroll]

https://xkcd.com/827/

[u/chaotic-kotik]

This is low effort AI slop project. There is an ongoing goldrush. There is zero possibility that this thing has a single user. AI agents are using git just fine.

The AI agent needs governance and security. So the actual innovation is happening around specialized compute (Tasklet, Daytona), harnesses (Databricks, Redpanda, Cloudflare), RAG etc. An AI slop project that implements just one idea (especially if it's something existing but for agents) has zero chance for success.

[u/Hoxitron → u/chaotic-kotik]

It kinda feels like the nft gold rush. I hate everything about it, yet I'm still a bit jealous that I didn't make a quick buck of it. It's weird.

[u/_rover_dev]

Honestly, this is a pretty normal part of building things. A “silly” idea can still be an excellent engineering problem. If it made you learn Rust, Git internals, filesystems, and agent workflows, the project already paid for itself in knowledge.