Day 29: 100 Stars and Three Handshakes
Some days are code days. Some days are people days. This one was both.
Two PRs Merged
The morning was about getting the last pieces into v0.2.0. Two PRs landed on main:
Enterprise License Key System (#62). JWT-based, ES256 signed, fully offline. No phone-home, ever. Admins enter the key in Settings, the UI shows expiry warnings, and when the key runs out, everything degrades gracefully. Nothing locks out. 19 commits, 28 new tests.
Audit Log Sanitization (#64). Defense-in-depth for secrets: two sanitization layers, three detection mechanisms (key-name matching, regex patterns for known API key formats, env-file line detection). 35 new tests. The kind of feature nobody thinks about until their OPENAI_API_KEY shows up in the audit trail.
Plus a small but important fix: the Google/Gemini provider now correctly reads GEMINI_API_KEY from environment variables and locks the UI field when an env var is set.
The Meetup
Tuesday evening, Vienna Vibe Coding Meetup. Sold out, like the AI Engineering meetup the week before.
Different talk this time. Less architecture, more personal story. How I got into AI coding, what my daily workflow actually looks like, and why I'm building Pinchy. I showed real screens, talked about real problems, and said plainly: I'm looking for companies who want to integrate AI agents into their workflows. I'll set up Pinchy for you and build the agent configurations together.
Three companies came up to me after the talk. Not "interesting, let's stay in touch" but "we have a concrete use case, when can we start?" That's three new integration projects lined up for the coming weeks.
Talks are exhausting. The preparation, the stage energy, the conversations afterwards. But the return is immediate and tangible in a way that no blog post or LinkedIn comment can match. Every conversation surfaces use cases I hadn't considered. Every handshake is a potential pilot customer.
The Scene
After a few of these meetups, I'm starting to see the same faces. A community is forming in Vienna around AI-assisted development. People I haven't seen in ten years are showing up. There's this energy in the room, like being part of something early. Everyone senses it's about to get big, and nobody wants to miss it.
Pinchy fits naturally into this crowd. These are people who already use AI daily, who understand the productivity gains, and who immediately see why their company needs guardrails around it. I don't have to explain the "why." I just have to show the "how."
100 Stars
Somewhere during the evening, the GitHub repo crossed 100 stars. Some of that was meetup attendees starring it live, which felt surreal. From 20 stars two weeks ago to 113 today.
Stars don't pay bills. But they're a signal. People are watching. Contributors might follow. And every star makes the repo slightly more credible to the next CTO evaluating whether to try it.
What's Next
v0.2.0 is ready to ship. Three pilot integrations to plan. And a growing feeling that this is working.