Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.

INTRO

The march towards Laravel support continues apace!

I'm happy to say that I wrapped up the rewrite of the CLI and released version 2.0. This was a massive amount of work. I could only do it this fast with the help of AI.
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I've now shifted back to consulting. The next sprint is going to be focused on getting Laravel support officially into beta. 🥳

PRODUCT

You can always view the history of Ymir's product development at https://ymirapp.com/changelog.

The Ymir CLI 2.0 was essentially a rewrite. I built it with the assumption that Ymir would only be a WordPress product. This is no longer the case. Ymir will be a PHP product once I do the rebrand.

On top of the assumption issue, I also don't have a lot of experience building CLI tools at this scale. (Currently, the CLI has close to 100 commands!) The tech debt in version 1.0 was immense. The CLI was essentially untestable, which is not somewhere you want to be with the primary way customers interact with your product.

Dealing with all these issues required a new architecture. Most of it is under the hood, so the commands themselves work like they did before. I tried to streamline and clean up the developer experience (DX) so that it was consistent throughout.

As I mentioned, this wouldn't have been possible without using AI to help. The rewrite was 30,000 lines of code. (You can look at it here.) While I'd already started in the fall, I did 80% of it in essentially a week and a half. I still had to be very involved. The last 10-20% was very much driven by me. When it's time to polish and clean up, you can really see the issues with letting AI do too much coding.

Outside of that, I did some bug fixes on the runtime. Zip deployments were not working. My mistake was trusting AI too much on that. Took a few fixes before we got it working properly.

MARKETING

I did more podcasts. This last one was live, so the video is out already!

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Still waiting for all the other podcasts to come out. It's surprising how long it's taking.

Otherwise, I started playing a bit with Gemini to create a new Ymir logo and hero image for the rebrand. I'm trying to lean into the whole product is my garden thing with some solarpunk aesthetics. I'm not sure about the logos still, but I'm pretty happy with the hero image! (There are some Easter eggs in it! 😅)

I'll probably stop with the image generation stuff for now. The focus should be more on the copywriting. But I keep reading about people doing cool things with AI image generation, so I wanted to play with it a bit.

BUSINESS

You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.

I have some trials going right now! So we'll see how that goes. Maybe we'll get a small subscriber bump!

Carl