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

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