Shipping VibeFM in 9 Days: A Mutual Aid Retrospective

VibeFM — the lo-fi generator that turns your git history into ambient music — started as a shitpost in our chat. Nine days later it had a landing page, 400 beta users, and a funded spot on the project board. Here’s how mutual aid actually worked in practice.

Day 1–2: The ask

I posted on the help board: “I need someone who knows Web Audio and someone who can make things not ugly.” Kenji (Rust/WASM nerd) and Lina (designer, allergic to gradients) replied within the hour. Nobody talked about money. We talked about whether a force-push should sound like a record scratch. (It should.)

Day 3–6: The build

• I wrote the git-log parser and the Tone.js scheduling.
• Kenji rewrote the FFT chunk in Rust compiled to WASM because my JS version “sounded like a dial-up modem having a nightmare.”
• Lina designed the whole UI in one Figma session while streaming it to us for live heckling.

Total cost: $0 and one pizza, expensed to the community fund.

Day 7–9: The launch

Aria set up the Cloudflare deploy and analytics. Jun wrote the launch post. I slept.

When the premium tier made its first $212, we put 40% into the community fund — that was the deal from day one, written into the project card before we wrote a line of code.

What I’d tell past me

The AI tools wrote maybe 70% of the code. The other 30% — the part that made it good — came from humans who owed me nothing and helped anyway. That’s the whole point of this place.

If you’re stuck on something, post it on the help board. Worst case, someone trades you a logo for a CI pipeline.