Ryan Patrick Smith

Scanning open source repos. Writing about them.

Building - An agent harness with an engine

Helping teams ship load bearing code quickly.

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

Its often just a sinking feeling. It's hard to make people care about a problem they don't yet feel. Talking to people sounds cliche, but its true.. You understand pretty quick. If you cant find people to try the product that's hard. If people try but don't stay because they don't NEED it thats often insurmountable.

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

In January I applied to YC with an AI agent payment platform on Solana. 16 agents on mainnet. 1k+ verified transactions. A feature in Forbes. Interviewed by a London VC.

Top 10% of applicants. Still rejected.

They were right.

I had engineering depth. I had press. I had transactions. What I didn't have was durable demand. I had a vitamin not a painkiller. People were interested. People were curious. Nobody was dependent.

Three lessons from the rejection:

1. Demand is the signal. Not engineering. Not depth. Not press mentions. You can't build your way to product-market fit. I tried. The code was good. The timing was wrong. No amount of engineering fixes wrong timing.

2. Build in public. I built it in private and tried to share it after. That's backwards. Nobody trusts a product that shows up fully formed from someone they've never heard of. Put your name behind it early. The messy version builds more trust than the polished launch. Building in public gives you credibility, and a backstory.

3. One real conversation beats a thousand transactions. I had on-chain proof that the system worked. I didn't have a single user who wasn't just tinkering and would be upset if it disappeared. When demand isn't there, stop building and start listening. Even one person telling you what they actually need changes everything.

The rejection redirected me. I realized the one thing that solved a real pain was the tooling I'd built to verify my own AI-written code. I shared it with a few friends and they kept using it. So I open-sourced it - Anatomia, MIT licensed, free forever.

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@Prathkum good developers will become system thinkers and replace swarms of developers - better start thinking in systems.

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@plainionist if you scope strong, spec well, essentially sed could do the 'coding'

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@Shaikh_Sadique3 no doubt Sadique

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@asciidiego badge has a brand new meaning

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@NajiNoname @GJarrosson

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@memoria_2024 @ravikiran_dev7 well that will have to change. if ai can build it all. modern engineers will have to know what to build, for who, and why

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@hunvreus deciding what to not build is a new superpower. one I also do not have 😂

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@subramanya 🙏

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@bindureddy Take that robots

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@Glenn6 If I invested in someone's product/startup i'd at least want to know that they have staked - publicly - their own reputation on it.

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@sqs @AmpCode GLM-4.6

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@benspringwater like call it vibes for a reason

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

now claude gets the current time before every message. Come back at 8am and it knows it's morning.

Anthropic closed the feature request. So I planned it myself. 2 lines of bash.

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

Hey @AnthropicAI why does claude still have no idea when you went to sleep. no timestamps on messages. a 30-second gap and a 12-hour gap look identical.

I come back at 8am and it says:
'before we wrap up tonight.'

The transcript already has timestamps. Can we just inject them into the system prompt 🙏.

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

fix it yourself in 30 sec:

[Ryan Patrick Smith @MindTheToken]

@cyrilgupta Hey Cyril i'm working on OSS harness that integrates with Claude Code, Codex and more to come! Helping Devs shipping load bearing code quickly https://t.co/TjlYSuBg1K