Articles

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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

#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

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

#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

#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

#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

#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

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

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

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