{"slug": "i-built-128-things-with-ai-127-are-dead-so-i-started-shipping-into-real-oss", "title": "I built 128 things with AI. 127 are dead. So I started shipping into real OSS instead.", "summary": "A Japanese developer built 128 AI projects in four months, but 127 failed due to poor distribution. Instead of building another app, they started contributing to open-source tools by localizing them into Japanese, fixing issues like half-translated UIs and IME bugs. They created a live counter tracking merged pull requests to provide verifiable proof of their work.", "body_md": "i built 128 things with AI in four months. then i made an AI dissect every one of them, and the verdict was uncomfortable: good at building, beginner at distribution, and 127 of them are already dead.\n\nso i stopped building app #129.\n\ninstead of shipping into the void again, i started shipping into tools people already use. in one day i opened pull requests localizing real open-source dev tools into Japanese — Hoppscotch, Jan, Betterlytics.\n\nhere's why it matters. i'm Japanese, Tokyo-based, and a lot of great tools quietly fall apart for Japanese users: half-translated UIs, the Enter key that fires mid-IME-conversion and submits your half-typed text, a `/ja`\n\nlocale with nothing routed to it. small, annoying, invisible-in-analytics stuff. exactly the stuff i can actually fix.\n\nthen i put a counter online that reads straight from GitHub's API: [https://greymoth-jp.github.io/proof-dashboard](https://greymoth-jp.github.io/proof-dashboard)\n\ni can't fake that number. when a maintainer merges my code, it ticks up on its own. that's the whole point — in a feed drowning in AI-generated \"i shipped X\" posts, the last thing that's genuinely hard to fake is code that passed someone else's review into production.\n\ni'm going to keep doing this, one PR at a time, in the open.\n\nso two questions, and i actually want answers:", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-128-things-with-ai-127-are-dead-so-i-started-shipping-into-real-oss", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/greymothjp/i-built-128-things-with-ai-127-are-dead-so-i-started-shipping-into-real-oss-instead-1ce0", "published_at": "2026-06-24 17:43:09+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-24 18:09:08.037556+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "developer-tools", "ai-products"], "entities": ["Hoppscotch", "Jan", "Betterlytics", "GitHub"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-128-things-with-ai-127-are-dead-so-i-started-shipping-into-real-oss", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-128-things-with-ai-127-are-dead-so-i-started-shipping-into-real-oss.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-128-things-with-ai-127-are-dead-so-i-started-shipping-into-real-oss.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-built-128-things-with-ai-127-are-dead-so-i-started-shipping-into-real-oss.jsonld"}}