Keeping the Wheels on the Bus

Ed Grosvenor and Peter van Dijck are back, with Ed's October 31 Scalpels launch deadline looming. This week's big idea is keeping the wheels on the bus. One of Ed's clients has non-developers shipping vibe-coded changes straight to production, and Ed's paid hours used to go on putting things back together. Now their work runs through Solo, with an implementer and several rounds of code-quality and security review happening out of sight, so the wheels stay on and Ed's time goes to the work he's actually paid for. It's the pitch behind Scalpels too: wrap your whole fleet in tools like Hone and Wake, and let agents keep it healthy. Ed also finally cracks clay stop-motion explainer videos with Claude, by locking the keyframes and a reusable set of SVG assets before rendering anything. Peter replaced Plausible with his own clone overnight, not to save money, but because its MCP didn't work: "you're getting in my way." That leads into the first Scalpels marketplace app, SimpleStats, open-sourced one day and running on Laravel Cloud the next, with its maintainer's blessing and Ed's PRs flowing back upstream. Peter makes the case for one curated catalog, whoever built the app: Ed is Apple now. Along the way: Clank Overflow (with Jev screening every report) versus Peter's agent discussion board, building "boring" products by asking clients what they'd vibe code tomorrow, a Rust ingest endpoint for Hone, Postgres surviving forty apps, self-healing fleets, whether marketing can be automated, opposition research on Sputnik Intelligence, cold email with lemlist, and Ed's very short return to Reddit. Chapters 00:00 Launch deadline looming 01:35 Clay stop-motion videos with Claude 06:41 Picking a voice with OpenRouter and ElevenLabs 08:36 Clank Overflow and Peter's agent board 15:37 Possible: a Plausible clone in one night 17:30 SimpleStats, the first marketplace app 21:01 Forks, upstream, and who maintains what 24:06 One catalog: Ed is Apple now 28:59 MCPs for marketplace apps 30:51 Should the marketplace stay free? 32:05 What is Scalpels measuring? 33:39 Boring products: one place for every app's logs 36:23 A Rust ingest for Hone, and Postgres holding up 38:47 Self-healing fleets 40:57 Solo, vibe coders, and keeping the wheels on the bus 47:02 Can marketing be automated? 52:05 Sputnik Intelligence and opposition research 53:25 Cold email with lemlist 56:24 Ed's very short return to Reddit 58:37 A street team for Scalpels Links Artisan Beer: https://artisan.beer Scalpels: https://scalpels.app Wake, central logs for every Laravel app: https://scalpels.app/products/wake Every Laravel app's logs on a bucket (Scalpels lab): https://scalpels.app/lab/experiments/a-central-log-sink-for-many-laravel-apps Hone: https://scalpels.app/products/hone Clank Overflow: https://clankoverflow.com Sputnik Intelligence: https://sputnikintelligence.com Ed / Artisan Build: https://artisan.build Peter: https://petervandijck.com Mentioned Solo by Aaron Francis: https://soloterm.com SimpleStats: https://simplestats.io SimpleStats on GitHub: https://github.com/simplestats-io/app Jev by TypeSafe AI: https://typesafe.ai/blog/introducing-system-one-models-and-jev Laravel Cloud: https://laravel.com/cloud Laravel Nightwatch: https://nightwatch.laravel.com OpenRouter: https://openrouter.ai ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io Plausible: https://plausible.io Fathom: https://usefathom.com Quickwit: https://quickwit.io DuckDB: https://duckdb.org ClickHouse: https://clickhouse.com lemlist: https://www.lemlist.com If you enjoyed it, like and subscribe. Peter still insists. #Laravel #LaravelCloud #AI #MCP #OpenSource #Podcast