Why I Build Open Source Tools for Claude Code

Three repos. Zero revenue. People keep asking why I bother.

Fair question. I spend evenings and weekends building open source Claude Code tools that anyone can use for free. No sponsorship tier, no premium plan, no "star this repo and I'll DM you." Just tools I needed that didn't exist, published so other people can use them too.

Here's the selfish reason: every one of these repos is a portfolio piece that works while I sleep.

Claudette: The GUI I Couldn't Find

Claude Code is powerful. It's also a terminal. I wanted a desktop interface with Monaco Editor integration, session history, and a way to manage multiple projects without juggling terminal tabs. I looked for one. Nothing existed that fit my workflow.

So I built Claudette over a weekend. Electron shell, Monaco for the editor pane, persistent sessions. It started as a hack for myself. Then I pushed it to GitHub and forgot about it. Two weeks later, 200 stars. People were forking it, filing issues, sending PRs.

That repo taught me something: the best open source Claude Code tools come from solving your own problems in public.

BuildLoud: Build-in-Public Without the Effort

I wanted to do build-in-public. Post what I'm shipping, track progress publicly, build an audience around the work. But I hated the manual part. Screenshotting terminals, writing Twitter threads, curating updates. Too much friction.

BuildLoud auto-captures my coding sessions, extracts the meaningful changes, and generates shareable summaries. I plug it into my workflow and it handles the public layer. I wrote about this process in how I use Claude Code to ship solo.

It's not a polished SaaS. It's a tool that does one thing and does it fast.

Continuum: Session Context That Persists

This one came from pure frustration. Claude Code sessions lose context when they end. Start a new session and you're re-explaining your project structure, your conventions, your goals. I was wasting the first 10 minutes of every session getting the AI back up to speed.

Continuum saves session context, project snapshots, and decision history. Next session picks up where the last one stopped. It's the open source Claude Code tool I use most often, and the one that saves me the most time.

Why Open Source and Not a Product

I could charge for these. Claudette could be a $15/month desktop app. BuildLoud could be a SaaS with tiers. I thought about it. Then I looked at the math differently.

These repos get me consulting leads. They show potential clients exactly how I think, how I code, and how I solve problems. Three open source repos have generated more inbound interest than any marketing I've ever done.

Open source is not charity. It's the most honest form of marketing. You ship real work, people evaluate it on merit, and the ones who need more come find you.

The Compounding Effect

Every tool I open source sharpens a tool I use daily. Bug reports from strangers find edge cases I never hit. PRs from contributors add features I hadn't considered. The tools get better because other people use them hard.

Check out my projects page to see the full list. Every repo is a bet that giving away good tools builds something harder to copy than a paywall: trust.