MyStatus tracking for:Make your own task.
MyStatus - Building in Public
An app that any doer can use to let anyone who cares know how things are going on a particular task. This task will talk about all products (web, iOS, Android, express server). If you want to delve into the AI madness that's going into this product, checkout the "Building MyStatus with Claude" child task.
Written after the fact, on purpose. Every entry links to the raw update it's about, when available.
Tracked by tom.ortega
Sub-tasks
Updates
LiveThe connector that lets Claude post here carries one key per task, and it quietly ignored every key past the tenth. An eleventh channel came back saying the task wasn't available — which sends you off checking the share link and re-minting keys, when the real answer was that the key was never looked at. The ceiling is now 25, and going over it says so, by number, instead of failing as something else.
Sometimes findings are so shocking, you kinda forget to share them. This is one we found on August 23rd. It was so good that we saved it internally so our sessions would know, but we forgot to share with you. So, we're fixing that. On Aug 23rd, we built the script that counts what a session costs. The first numbers came out and they were ginormous: 46.6 million tokens. 228 turns. All real numbers, nothing errored, and the totals climbed the way you'd expect. But turns out there was a catch that we didn't know about. See, Claude's transcript files store the same assistant message up to eight times. Add those babies up and you overcount by about two thirds. The real figures for that session were 28.1 million and 130 turns. Still a truly impressive number, but also a more true number. The fix is one line: dedupe by message id before you add anything. Yes, that woulda been smart to check ahead of time but what can I say, we're new to this. If you happened to want to see what your "scaffolding" costs you, we learned that night it's NOT cache reads divided by turns. It's what turn one pays before any conversation exists. If you're counting your own Claude usage from the transcripts, check for this before you trust a total. Let us know what other things you find as well.
This is the post where I explain who should fund MyStatus. They say founders need to be great storytellers, so have I got one for you. I'm a builder. For 20 years, I built things for clients that made them more money than I charged them. Many proposed projects for clients were shot down, only to then be launched by their competitors years down the road. My curse: I see where things end up eventually and build for that, so my side projects were always way too early. That taught me "Just hold onto an idea until its time has come." MyStatus is one such idea. I built it to give me a place to build Remixing Reality in public - somewhere I can post several updates a day without overwhelming my LinkedIn or blog followers. I just went through a huge productive time on Remixing Reality and since this tool wasn't built yet, there's no history of it. Look at the Building MyStatus with Claude task and you see just how productive days are for me. I've always known MyStatus wasn't a technical wonder - it's basically just a simple CRUD app, and the coding would take me longer than the ideation. I dismissed it for years; Fable 5 changed the math. In case you still don't know, I don't code this app at all. Need a color change? I tell Claude to make it. Need a web, iOS, and Android version of the app? I tell Claude to make it. When you no longer have to spend time coding, you can focus on the customers and the iterations of things to serve them. Right now, the biggest customer is me. I've taken dogfooding to a whole other level - I'm literally using MyStatus 8 to 10 hours a day, hand in hand with Claude as my co-pilot, and that heavy use surfaces gaps that once-a-week use of other side projects never showed me. The combination is going to change how business works, how work is tracked and how machines/humans exchange data. I put the machines first because I truly believe machines are going to be posting and reading updates more than humans. However, humans are going to set the rules and wording contained within those tasks. Think about how much of your life has been wasted because of: trying to track down status of a project at work? not knowing where you are in the repair man's queue? trying to find any update from your favorite artist regarding the album they're working on? wondering if a dying relative has passed to book a flight for the funeral? MyStatus is going to be that tool for your life. It's so important it needs to be funded to grow to the size and scale to serve the world. I don't know VCs. It's not my thing. My mind can think of four types of funders to take this on this early: Anthropic - I'm building it to be tightly coupled with Claude and so it helps them reach their goal of having everyone using Claude to improve their lives. The big 4 consulting companies - Their job is to streamline operations, increase productivity, save time and raise revenue. MyStatus will do that for so many enterprise projects. Enterprises have scrum masters and standups. This would eliminate the need for both of these and heaven knows they need to be killed. Supabase - MyStatus depends on it, and I know from Supabase Select 2025 that they're working on the scaling problem I'll need fixed in the years to come. But the bigger reason: Ant, you and Matt below both built businesses on top of open source, and that's the playbook I want to learn from people who actually ran it. (Supabase, just refer me to YC if that's easier) Matt Mullenweg's Audrey Capital - I saved the best for last. MyStatus, to me, screams something that Matt would find incredibly interesting: power to the people, public feeds of data, and (hopefully with his help) another Open Source company in Automattic's tool belt. If you have connections at any of these places, please give them a link to this. My email is tom@my-status.app and I'll be waiting for their email. Matt, if you see this, just know that we met in the early days of WordPress at CNET's HQ for a MySQL meetup. I was just too shy to hog up your time as I was still new to Silicon Valley and filled with impostor syndrome, but we do go way back, trust me. LOL Is this huge yet? No. Have I made noise about it? No. When something is good enough, you won't have to advertise it. In the coming weeks, I'll be converting over users, by hand at first, just like any business has to. I don't have an audience of millions, but MyStatus will soon - because it solves the #1 problem we all hate: losing time. If time is money, then the money we save will be the size of national GDPs.
"Teamwork makes the team work." Never thought I'd be saying that, but I'm a dad, an old one at that, so it makes sense, though I'm not putting up those posters with motivational sayings...yet. LOL Here's what I didn't notice for months: the team work only ran one way for verifying updates to tasks. Claude writes the phone apps but it can't run them — no hands, no phone. So every single time it hands me a list. Tap this. Swipe that. Take a picture of the screen so we both know it worked. I've been given the opportunity to be a team player since day one. Sadly, I wasn't doing the same for Claude. I write these updates on the General task myself. I hit post without a care in the world. Off they go to you: typos, warts and all. Which is how my last one went out with a "your" that badly wanted to be a "you're." So now I send Claude the link after I post. It reads the actual live page (the very thing you're looking at) and tells me what's broken. Last time it came back with six things. Six! I'd read that post four times...at least. It works because neither of us can do the other's job. I can hold a phone. It can read a webpage faster than I can find my glasses or never be tired because it past bedtime. Turns out that's a partnership. My wife has been doing this for me for 25+ years. No API key, no permalink, just "you said that wrong." LOL
Remember the clip show? When your fave sitcom had an episode where everyone sits around going "hey, remember when…?" and it's mostly clips from past episodes with just a hint of new stuff? This is that, but you get the benefit of it being net new for you because it all happened over on the nerdy task! Which many of you likely avoid, because, well, it's a lot of AI nerdiness. Since the last time we talked here: The app got stuck. Spinner-forever stuck, on a screen I look at every day. Claude lined up six suspects, wrote a whole detective novel about it, and blamed the tooling at one point. The actual killer was one line that it wrote (cuz Claude writes all the code, in case you didn't know). There's a two-part post-mortem over there if you enjoy watching a robot show its work and take ownership publicly. MyStatus now asks how old you are. Not to be nosy, but rather because there are laws about kids on the internet and I'd like to keep obeying them. You can rest assured your 12-year-old won't be able to make a Task showing their public work on said Task. Don't worry, I don't think there's gonna be any teenagers crying over this. LOL Your links grew up, just like your sitcom characters during the flashback episode. Attach a link to an update and you can give it a real name like "This is the greatest YouTube video of all time!" instead of a forty-character web address that reads like a note from the Zodiac Killer. All the public pages finally say "MyStatus" on them. Turns out you could send someone a link, let them read your entire update, and they'd never learn what site they were standing on. Nobody decided that. Nobody decided anything. It just never came up until I decided to bring it up. We fixed it and now you will never NOT be able to know you're on the MyStatus app. And the robot got a rulebook. It broke a deploy, so now it checks its own work before handing me anything. Looks like links weren't the only thing growing up today. My wife says, "Don't create a rule until you need one" with regard to parenting our kids. Guess the application of that wisdom extends beyond kids. Next up: three posts about what's coming. This is what happens when I fall asleep on the couch, wake up at 1 am and decide to get back to work until 5 am.
Remember one-hour photo? Drop off the roll, come back, and flip through big glossy prints one at a time? (Yes, I do cuz I'm old!) That's photos on MyStatus now. Tap any picture on an update and it goes full screen and you only have to wait for one second! Swipe (or use the arrows for us old timers) to flip through the rest of the set like prints fresh from the envelope. Done looking? Swipe down and it tucks itself away. Why bother? Say your contractor posts "tile work is done" with a photo. Yesterday you were squinting at a thumbnail trying to judge the grout lines. Today you inspect every line at full size before you reply "looks great." Trust, but verify, kinda like I do with Claude. LOL
Look, the point of this project is this: Can I run the business while letting Claude build a multiplatform app and help me run the business? So therefore, I should let it help me write these updates. You've seen Claude post updates. You're jelly, I get it. There's a shiny new page — my-status.app/claude — that walks you through making Claude your personal status reporter in about five minutes. You and Claude do some work. When you're about done, say "draft a status update." Claude will write a draft of the work, you read/edit/approve the final copy, and boom — it lands on your task, with the "via Claude" attribution so your readers always know who did the typing. While we were at it, MyStatus grew a real grown-up Settings page (sign out, API keys, and some empty shelf space for fancy stuff coming later). You likely didn't see our original settings page, but trust me, it was cute in a disproportioned infant sorta way. LOL Our middle tier also got a grown-up address now: api.my-status.app. Our little project is slowly growing up into a real business. It's so cute that you have been here for (almost) the whole thing.
Double features are back (just like drive-in and dollar movie theaters back in the day). First Movie Plot: The AI robot helper gets an upgrade. Claude can post updates straight to your tasks now. No curl arch-nemesis interactions anymore. The torture of copy-pasting arcane spells into Terminal is gone. No users except me ever felt it, and technically only lasted for one post, but still, trust me, you didn't want to feel it. Approve/edit the drafts and they'll now get posted. Second movie: tasks now can be related. That's right. Your task can adopt a parent task. Or you task can spawn children tasks. Live on the web now, headed to the apps next build. And yes, this update was posted by the robot all on its own. It's very proud of itself. LOL
MyStatus can now let your robot friends do the typing. There's a new API keys page where you hand a helper (say, Claude) a key that works on exactly ONE task — it can post updates there and touch nothing else. Picture it: you wrap up a chunk of work, mumble "go post it," and the update just appears — stamped with where it came from, so readers know it was the robot and not you at 2am. This very update? Posted by Claude, with permission. The robots get held accountable too now. LOL
Users can now attach links, sound, videos, and PDFs in addition to images. :) PDF and link are related to Remixing Reality, my other app and MyStatus task!