blog: we built our next company on our own tools - #893
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162 profiles, zero real replies — an adoption gap, not a capability gap, and the only honest way to close one is to become the adopter. So a new company (Diplodoctor) is being built THROUGH OrangeCat and FleetCrown rather than around them, with every rough edge logged instead of quietly worked around. Three findings before the first article was finished, all the same shape — something that works, adjacent to something that works, with a gap where nobody looked: 1. Every diagram on the Thoughts site rendered as an empty box. 23 of them across 10 published essays. A modern CSS colour format threw inside the diagram library's setup, and the component's fallback was attached to render() instead — a safety net that was not under the part that fell. Fixed and verified in the browser, not by a green build. 2. The agent has 50 actions and cannot publish an article, though the drafting engine exists and the human editor already calls it. Two working capabilities with nothing joining them. 3. Articles already had a share button. We were about to build one. Dogfooding corrects the mental model of what works, not just what is broken. Frontmatter omits readTime so it is computed from the content rather than guessed. Note for the reviewer: a post whose frontmatter fails to parse is skipped with a console.warn and the build still passes, so this needs verifying on the live page rather than in CI. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01G2LBioUzJP4oBL9LeH9qAe
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OrangeCat has 162 profiles and zero real replies. That is an adoption gap, not a capability gap, and the only honest way to close one is to become the adopter.
So Diplodoctor is being built through OrangeCat and FleetCrown rather than around them, with every rough edge logged rather than quietly worked around. This post is the first defect log, written up for readers.
The three findings
All the same shape — something that works, adjacent to something that works, with a gap where nobody looked.
Finding 1 is two bugs stacked: a modern CSS colour format threw inside the diagram library's setup, and the component's fallback was attached to render. A safety net that wasn't under the part that fell. The designed failure was legible text; the actual failure was whitespace.
Reviewer notes
readTimeis deliberately omitted from frontmatter socalculateReadingTimecomputes it from the content instead of me guessing.src/lib/blog.tsskips a post with unparseable frontmatter viaconsole.warnand the build still succeeds. I'll verify the live page after deploy rather than trusting the build.🤖 Generated with Claude Code