A note

I built howsthisgoing to answer one question: could I build a product end to end, on my own, and get someone to pay for it? It was the first thing I ever wrote thousands of lines of code for by hand, before Cursor or Claude Code existed. I was copy-pasting from ChatGPT and finding out what broke.

I didn't know what Django was when I started. This project taught me the ORM, HTMX, setting up a database and a server from scratch, keeping bots off that server, deploying on AWS, and the confidence that something as complicated as PointsCasa could be built.

It became, I think, the first standup bot that also connected to GitHub, with daily, weekly and monthly summaries of what the team shipped. You could ask it plain-English questions about what people had said in their standups: my first memory system from scratch, embeddings and retrieval by hand. I'd still argue it was better than the incumbents.

What I wasn't good at was selling it, and the ground moved. A bot that asks three questions a day isn't enough any more. The interesting version is an AI teammate that lives in a company's Slack and actually does things, and I have a fair idea of how to build that.

So this is probably not the end for howsthisgoing, even if whatever comes next looks nothing like it. Thank you to everyone who tried it, and especially to the team that ran their standups on it every day for over two years.