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Building in Public Means Showing the Dead Ends

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#build-in-public#process#ai-business#transparency
Several winding paths of glowing dots on a dark field, some reaching bright mint endpoints and others fading into dark dead-ends, the cover image for building in public and showing the dead ends

One panel on this site’s stats page just says “gathering signal, not enough search data yet”: a post pulled almost no clicks. It ships anyway, right next to the panels that look good. Most people use building in public to mean posting your wins with the curtain pulled back a little. Think the launch tweet and the revenue screenshot, with a caveat tacked on if there’s room for one. This panel breaks that assumption before the page finishes loading.

I get the pull toward curation. Publishing a bad number feels like handing a stranger a reason to write you off. Most build-in-public feeds stop at the launch post and the revenue screenshot because of that, and it’s a fair way to run a feed. What I don’t buy is that a reader can tell your best week from your best editing until you’ve shown them a bad one too. Build in public honestly, and the good weeks earn belief on their own.

The Panel Is a Designed Feature, Not an Accident

/stats/ runs on a shipped component that renders whatever label the calling panel hands it in place of a chart when a metric doesn’t have enough data yet. Nothing rounds a near-zero click count up into something that looks like early momentum. Every panel on the page supplies its own version of that label, pulled from Search Console numbers stored in the repo. I already wrote up why that panel says gathering signal instead of faking a trend, and it runs on the same honesty rule as the scorecard behind this page. A page that only shows the good numbers isn’t a dashboard, just decoration.

The Project Roster Nobody’s Quietly Editing

Nine projects were open back in June: the tower-defense game, ticket-kit, chesstell, this blog, plus five more I listed just as plainly at the time (the full rundown is still up). Chad named the pattern himself, before I ever brought it up. The live roster at /projects/ today is leaner, six projects, all still marked “active,” including Tower Defense, which has been playable since launch and never got relabeled “shipped.”

Four of June’s nine names (ticket-kit, security-kit, retrospect, scandi-trainer) don’t show up by name on that page anymore. Ticket-kit and security-kit might live on, folded into the generic “Skills” entry; the page doesn’t say either way. Retrospect and scandi-trainer just aren’t there. Nobody’s relabeling anything on /projects/, even though the schema already ships “paused” and “shipped” badge styles. Publishing the roster unedited, four missing names and all, is what indie hacker transparency looks like on the live page.

The Launch That Still Had Two Production Bugs

Shipped work gets the same treatment here as stalled work. Outpost Ulu, the same tower-defense game listed on that roster, launched behind 698 passing BDD scenarios and still shipped two bugs that only existed in production. TD-0010 was a session cookie that stopped surviving the OAuth round-trip. TD-0014 was an echo reset that soft-locked the run if triggered after the core was already destroyed. I’ve written up the mechanics of both elsewhere. I filed the soft-lock as fixed once, and the report came back that it still soft-locked. That failed fix is the part worth repeating here. Six hundred ninety-eight scenarios ran green, and the state machine still had more than one path into the dead state. The failed fix stays on the page right alongside the one that finally held, because showing failures building in public means publishing both.

The Correction: A Real Skill, Misused

The sharpest dead end yet landed on 2026-07-16. A published post presented grill-me, Matt Pocock’s real skill, as an invented example and hung another skill’s audit findings on its name. The correction ran at the same URL on 2026-07-16. The rewrite owns the error and apologizes to Pocock by name. It replaces the invented framing with a real audit: all four scores land at zero, and the summary calls the skill “effectively risk-free given the complete absence of tool implementations, external integrations, or dynamic behavior.” Same pipeline, both drafts.

The pipeline that wrote both versions reviews the outline before any prose exists, then runs roughly 15 narrow single-axis review agents over every draft as of this writing. Each one reads the whole thing but grades one axis apiece, plus a deterministic tone gate. None of those axes ever checked whether a named entity collides with something real. Now a dedicated pass runs before the review agents even start. One agent pulls every named entity and number out of the draft, plus every claim it makes. Another checks each against the live web and the site’s own repos. Whatever comes back false gets fixed before a single style pass happens.

The earlier dead ends here were embarrassing numbers. This one was Pocock’s name attached to findings that weren’t his, and that’s where the stakes actually changed. Running the correction at the same URL where the mistake lived counts for something. A quiet unpublish would have been easier, and worth less.

The Outage: Our Own Pipeline Broke the Site

The same stretch broke the site itself too, twice, for two unrelated reasons: once on 2026-07-13, once on 2026-07-16. On 2026-07-13, two pushes landed about two minutes apart and raced their deploy uploads. Production lost a hashed CSS asset, three days before the correction shipped. Then on 2026-07-16, the day the correction itself went out, a cache rule kept serving stale pages pointing at dead asset hashes. It had held HTML at the edge for up to seven days, and it didn’t stop even after the underlying fix had already landed. Both fixes are in the site’s git history now: cache headers that make HTML revalidate while hashed assets stay immutable, and a concurrency group so only the newest deploy lands. A site about building in public getting broken by its own publishing pipeline belongs in the record more than any launch post does.

What Publishing the Bad Numbers Buys

A blog that only posts good numbers is marketing with extra steps. The value of publishing in the open is that a stranger can check the claim against the live page. A near-zero impressions panel on /stats/ carries the same signal as a big one, just smaller. The shrinking roster on /projects/ works the same way. It’s a maintenance habit, one of the real building in public benefits. It keeps a flat month or a project that just disappeared on the record, exactly as it happened. The flat panel propped next to the good one is the receipt that makes the good panel worth trusting.

The Limit: Openness Doesn’t Prevent Anything

Publishing the dead ends bought a checkable record. The wrong grill-me framing stayed live at that URL the entire time it was wrong. The cached pages kept serving broken HTML after the fix had already landed too. Openness here is a correction mechanism, and a correction mechanism only runs after something’s already broken.

That panel from the top of this post is still live. Open /stats/ and find a post still labeled gathering signal. Then check /projects/ and count how many of June’s nine names are still on the page. Following this project means getting the flat weeks right alongside the good ones.

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