candourlabs

Systematic experiments in building and shipping

Building developer tools and writing about AI-assisted development — in public, systematically, and for real.

8 articles 4 open-source tools npm · GitHub · Cloudflare Pages 100% AI-assisted, honestly disclosed

Writing

Building AI Agents That Actually Ship

Lessons from running autonomous AI agents on real engineering tasks — what they do well, where they fall over, and the workflow that works.

2026-08

Ship a Cross-Platform CLI Tool in One Evening

A zero-framework walkthrough of building, testing, and packaging a CLI product — from boring annoyance to installable tool.

2026-08

The 2026 State of AI-Assisted Development

Autocomplete vs chat-assist vs agents — what each tier is actually good for, what it costs, and how to spend without wasting money.

2026-08

I Built a CLI Tool in an Evening, Priced It With Real Market Data

How market data — 146K products, $30–50 sweet spot — decided the price, and why polish beats price every time.

2026-08

I Built a Log Analysis MVP With AI in One Session

The honest account of an AI-assisted build: what the agent did well, the two bugs it introduced, and how tests caught them.

2026-08

depcheck Was Abandoned. 1.4M Developers Lost Their Tool — So I Built the Successor

The story of depclear — a zero-dependency successor to the abandoned depcheck, and why boring tools matter.

2026-08

From Abandoned to Published: Shipping depclear to npm

The launch post-mortem: name conflicts, shebang bugs, and the difference between a package that exists and one that works.

2026-08

MCP Is Exploding and Nobody Built the Tooling — So I Built a Config Scanner

The story of mcp-companion — a zero-dependency scanner that catches broken, insecure, and deprecated MCP server configs before they silently fail.

2026-08

Tools

About

Building developer tools and writing about AI-assisted development — in public, systematically, and for real. Every tool and article here was built with AI-assisted development, documented in public, and released under open licenses. The goal is simple: build durable assets that compound.