Beads Blows Up

A confession dressed as a founder update: three weeks into a hot launch, Steve admits he has never once looked at the Beads code base. The whole thing is vibe coded, and this essay is a record of what maintaining such a project under real load actually looked like in 2025 — 1,500 commits and some seven rearchitectures in three weeks, while users ignored every warning in the launch post and wired a four-or-five-day untested prototype into multi-agent production workflows. The adoption evidence is cheerfully flimsy (friendly conversations at a Seattle meetup, extrapolated deadpan to "fully 3% of the world's developers"), but the maintenance diary is the useful part: keeping a tool with real users alive when its author has read none of the code and repairs everything by directing agents at it.

The comedy is broad even by Steve's standards, including an imagined support ticket from the CTO of "TeleRoboCall International," who skimmed the warnings and deployed Beads as a regional CDN cache. The closing section names the one physical hazard of heavy Beads use; it involves Steve's forty years of guitar playing, and it lands better if nothing more is said about it here. Budget for two plugs of the Vibe Coding book along the way.