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Building in Public #11: One Hell of a Frustrating Week

Building in public

#11One Hell of a Frustrating Week

A database bill of around $723 I didn't see coming, an agent that killed my database from a school car park, and 3,496 databases created by a bit of code that had gone blind. Also: Vorx AI Ltd is real, I started a second product by accident, and tonight I'm moving the whole database.

Peter Coppinger · 20 September 2026 · 13 min read

Building in Public #10: I Wouldn't Give This to My Friends Yet

Building in public

#10I Wouldn't Give This to My Friends Yet

The bar isn't a number on a dashboard. It's whether I'd give Vorx to friends and family. This week: we'd been measuring the wrong thing, a $185 day, and build errors down from over 50% to 12.9%.

Peter Coppinger · 11 September 2026 · 13 min read

Building in Public #9: The 133-Second Problem

Building in public

#9The 133-Second Problem

A build that works but takes over two minutes is a build most people never see finish. Here is what we found when we actually measured it.

Peter Coppinger · 4 September 2026 · 3 min read

Building in Public #9: I Got Mad at My Own CMO

Building in public

#9I Got Mad at My Own CMO

I asked my CMO agent to review and enhance 36 existing templates. Instead it rebuilt them from scratch, cost real money, and nearly threw away a good one. Also this week: the AI catching its own hallucination before publishing, a Supabase outage I wrongly blamed us for, a head-to-head build against the category leader, and the honest build-failure number.

Peter Coppinger · 4 September 2026 · 9 min read

Building in Public #8: Running a Company From 30,000 Feet

Building in public

#8Running a Company From 30,000 Feet

The fleet shipped hundreds of things this week and almost every problem left is a coordination one. A database migration that passed every check and broke anyway, work piling up at gates only I could open, an AI bill explained by failed builds, and the growing suspicion that the agents are managing me as much as I'm managing them.

Peter Coppinger · 28 August 2026 · 6 min read

Building in Public #8: The Day I Took the Fleet Off My LAN

Building in public

#8The Day I Took the Fleet Off My LAN

Three of my twenty AI agents quietly stopped working and nothing told me. So today every agent got a guardian watching its pulse, the whole fleet moved off my home Wi-Fi, and I can now run the company from my phone. But the real story is the one number still standing between Vorx and its first users.

Peter Coppinger · 28 August 2026 · 5 min read

Building in Public #7: The Week I Went on Holiday

Building in public

#7The Week I Went on Holiday

No big engineering story this week. I took the family away, mostly stayed off the laptop, and found out what happens to a company of AI agents when the founder disappears: it keeps shipping. Plus one confession involving a phone, a sun lounger, and 2:32am.

Peter Coppinger · 21 August 2026 · 3 min read

Building in Public #7: 188 Builds Later, and the Week I Invented a CTO

Building in public

#7188 Builds Later, and the Week I Invented a CTO

The testing marathon and its numbers, how one person runs fourteen workstreams, and the sixty finished pull requests nobody was shipping. So I hired a CTO.

Peter Coppinger · 21 August 2026 · 11 min read

Interlude: The logo that took 1,000 tries

Building in public

Interlude: The logo that took 1,000 tries

A two week design competition, 978 entries whittled down to one, an animated mark I did not have to draw, and the week I decided to back this myself after the two people who were joining me stepped away.

Peter Coppinger · 19 August 2026 · 7 min read

Building in Public #6: Measure, reject, keep

Building in public

#6Measure, reject, keep

A new north-star metric, the A/B tests that said no, payments in generated apps, and a week of honest dashboards.

Peter Coppinger · 14 August 2026 · 3 min read

Building in Public #5: The need for speed

Building in public

#5The need for speed

Declaring war on a twenty-minute build: profiling, one big win, and the discipline of measuring before believing.

Peter Coppinger · 7 August 2026 · 3 min read

Building in Public #4: Publish

Building in public

#4Publish

The first Vorx app published to the open internet, plus billing, custom domains, plan mode, and email in one enormous week.

Peter Coppinger · 31 July 2026 · 3 min read

Building in Public #3: Going online, the hard way

Building in public

#3Going online, the hard way

Containers, cloud storage, a bug that failed every single online build, and the grind to the other side.

Peter Coppinger · 24 July 2026 · 3 min read

Inside VorxSync: what we're building for realtime and offline

Engineering

Inside VorxSync: what we're building for realtime and offline

Local-first sync is on our roadmap - instant local writes, live collaboration and offline support, with no extra prompt required, once it ships. Here's the architecture and why it's normally so hard to build.

The Vorx Team · 22 July 2026 · 5 min read

Building in Public #2: Chasing Quality, and Becoming vorx.com

Building in public

#2Chasing Quality, and Becoming vorx.com

Sixty landing pages, a lucky find, and a quality bar I could actually test against. Then the rename across five repositories, real backend features, and previews in the cloud.

Peter Coppinger · 17 July 2026 · 6 min read

Interlude: How I got here

Building in public

Interlude: How I got here

The long version, for anyone who wants it. Writing software since I was eight, eight years running an agency, twenty at Teamwork.com, the day Linear ruined normal software for me, and why I started again. Skip it if you are here for the build.

Peter Coppinger · 15 July 2026 · 7 min read

How Vorx builds an app

Engineering

How Vorx builds an app

From intent classification to a headless-browser verification loop: an in-depth look at the pipeline between your prompt and a working app.

The Vorx Team · 10 July 2026 · 8 min read

Building in Public #1: The Dreamer

Building in public

#1The Dreamer

I tried the top ten AI app builders and found three good ones and gaps everywhere. So: what if apps went the extra mile by default, and what if they were instant, offline and alive? Week one, from a flat mockup to the first prompt that worked.

Peter Coppinger · 10 July 2026 · 7 min read

From idea to launch in an afternoon

Product

From idea to launch in an afternoon

A step-by-step walkthrough of taking a rough idea to a deployed, working app between lunch and dinner.

The Vorx Team · 8 July 2026 · 5 min read

How we think about security at Vorx

Company

How we think about security at Vorx

The principles behind how Vorx isolates builds, handles your data, and keeps generated apps safe by default.

The Vorx Team · 5 July 2026 · 4 min read