2025 was a big year of changes. After almost 9 years at Google as a software engineer, I decided to quit and build my own business.

Dyad v0

At first, I thought I was going to build something like an AI pair programmer which would coach junior software engineers, but I quickly realized there was pretty much no interest. I would post on Reddit and ask people to try it out (for free!) and the response was tepid.

I came to the realization that the people who were really excited about AI coding were not developers at all. Lovable had just started taking off (this was in April 2025) and I was surprised to find out that there were non-developers using tools like Cursor and Claude Code to build software. I had a hypothesis that there was a missing middle sweet spot for these power users, who weren't developers but were technical enough to wade into IDEs and CLIs to get more control in how they built software compared to the web-based vibe coding tools.

I decided to throwaway Dyad v0 completely which I'd been working on for months during my paternity leave and pivot to completely different tech stack and focus on these non-developer power users. I started getting an inkling that people would be interested when I posted on a few sub-reddits if people would be interested in a free, local, open-source alternative to Lovable and similar vibe coding tools. Even though it was just an idea, there was much more interest than when I had a built out product with the AI coding mentor idea.

Dyad v0.1

After feverishly building Dyad (heavily relying on AI coding, using Cursor!) for two weeks, I decided to ship early and started posting on those same sub-reddits. Even though it was extremely rough around the corners and onboarding was painful, people were willing to try it! I got bug reports and feature requests almost immediately.

Then, the big break happened when I posted on r/nocode and shared that I was an ex-Google engineer building this open-source AI app builder. I offered to chat with anyone for 30 minutes about AI coding (it didn't have to be about Dyad!). It was kind of a fascinating social experiment and people appreciated the generosity of the offer. For the next few weeks, I chatted with people around the world who were using AI coding and it made me appreciate how much opportunity AI created for non-developers. People who could only dream of building software were now empowered to build so much more.

Dyad v0.2 to v0.32

I won't bore you with the details of every release :) (you can see Dyad's docs for a full collection of our release notes), but basically I followed a pretty straightforward weekly ritual:

Start building new features and fix bugs, mostly based on user feedback and sometimes just things that I wanted as a user of Dyad.
Cut a new release, manually test it (now it's mostly tested by automated tests!) and write up release notes, usually with a short video of the headline feature.
Post the release on Reddit, (sometimes) X and occasionally the newsletter.

I found this weekly ritual helpful in keeping me (and Dyad) grounded. Rather than trying to chase lofty goals, I had a concrete goal of making Dyad better every week.

When you're working from home and by yourself, it's easy to get discouraged or distracted. And even though I didn't need to ship every week, I knew the Dyad community appreciated the frequent releases and this motivated me to keep going.