# Why I open-sourced the tool I built "just for myself" > Source: > Published: 2026-08-16 07:10:20+00:00 It started as a selfish project: a phone remote for my own desktop agent. Three reasons made me push it public. The third one surprised me. I built [DeepSeek Phone Harness](https://github.com/2903077918-lgtm/DeepSeek-phone-harness) for one reason: I was in bed at 1 a.m., wanted to send a task to the agent on my computer, and refused to get up. Pure selfishness. It worked so well that I kept using it. And then I had to decide: keep it private, or open it up? The hardest bug — the one that made tasks hang forever — was invisible until you knew it existed: **DSH's agent-question channel is separate from its approval channel.** Miss it, and every `ask_user_question` call deadlocks your pipeline silently. There's no way to discover this by reading docs. You have to capture a real event stream, notice a frame type nobody told you about, and chase it for two days. **That kind of hard-won knowledge should be public** — someone else shouldn't have to re-pay that tuition. "Phone as a remote for a desktop agent" is a genuinely useful pattern. But right now it lives in scattered, platform-specific implementations. An MIT-licensed, zero-dependency reference implementation lowers the floor: anyone can clone it, read ~4000 lines, and build their own — for DeepSeek Harness, or any agent runtime with a similar event model. Open-sourcing it forced me to do things I wouldn't have bothered with otherwise: **The tool got better in the week after open-sourcing than in the week before.** That surprised me, and it's the reason I'll keep building in public. Nothing, really. But if you take one thing: **when you fix a nasty bug nobody warned you about, write it down and put it where others can find it.** That's the entire spirit of this project. Repo (MIT, zero dependencies, three-minute setup): *Have you open-sourced something you built "for yourself"? What changed? I'd genuinely like to know.*