Out into the world
The last two months have been about getting it out of our own workshop and into places that matter.
We put the platform in front of real use. Several of the apps Builder made went live on our own internal instance, running together, for people who are not us to actually work in. Deployment is the unglamorous half of this - the half where you find out what you glossed over - and we spent a good part of it fixing things that only break once real people touch them.
We gave the whole thing a place to live that travels. A project is now a single folder you can copy onto a machine and run, with everything it needs inside it: no install, no dependency hunt. We call it a Workshop. The idea is old for us; it is where this started, a stubborn belief that software should move as one piece. It took until now to make it true for the whole platform.
And we gave Builder a second reader - not another copy of itself, but a reviewer from a different family of model entirely, whose job is to attack a plan or a change and find what our own kind of thinking misses. Two minds that fail in different ways catch more than two that fail the same way. It has already stopped things our own review waved through.
Somewhere in these weeks the feeling of what this could be really opened up. We noticed we had features in daily internal use that companies far larger than us, with far more people, have not shipped. It is a strange thing to sit with. If we are making software that works, with capabilities the big platforms have not delivered yet, then this stopped being a side project some time ago. We could change who gets to build good software, and how.
We have gone, these two months, from a builder that worked in private to one whose apps are in real use, that travels as a single folder, and that argues with a mind unlike its own before it commits. It is starting to feel less like we are building a tool and more like we are building a way for other people to build.