Every great tool starts with someone getting really, really tired of doing things the hard way.
December 26, 2024. I was building features for my SaaS, hitting the same workflow for the hundredth time that day:
And you know what made it worse?
It was often the same damn mistakes.
"Hang on! My website has access to GitHub... could we add an environment variable to Vercel for access to the repo and then build an admin page with Claude integration? I could ask you to code the site from within the site!"
That throwaway comment during a late-night coding session sparked everything. What if the application could modify its own source code?
"What if the site could edit itself?" First concept sketched out during frustrating copy-paste session.
Surgical edits working! The site modified itself for the first time: "Good morning, Rich" appeared in the navbar.
Added 5-layer validation: TypeScript parsing, semantic checking, ESLint, imports, and build verification.
The breakthrough: Before editing, automatically fetch imported files and their dependencies. Full context, every time.
BuildFix now remembers every mistake and learns patterns. Same error never happens twice.
BuildFix detects failed builds, analyzes git history, generates fixes, and creates PRs. All in under 12 seconds.
Day 1: "I'll build a quick helper tool"
Day 3: "Wait, this is actually revolutionary"
Day 5: "v2.8 with recursive investigation!"
Day 7: "This could change software development"
Day 10: *looks up*
Day 10: "Oh right, IncidentBuddy..."
The tool built to accelerate development became more valuable than the product it was built to accelerate.
| Feature | Copilot | Cursor | v0 | BuildFix |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Code generation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Context awareness | Limited | Good | Basic | Full codebase |
| Self-modifying | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-healing | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-learning | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
| Auto-validation | ✗ | Partial | ✗ | ✓ |
The hardest problem wasn't generating code. It was understanding what the developer was trying to do.
When a build fails, the naive approach is: "Fix the error."
The BuildFix approach is:
If someone adds a feature and makes a typo, you don't want to remove the feature — you want to fix the typo while keeping the feature.
Sometimes the best products come from solving your own problems.
I didn't set out to build a revolutionary AI coding platform. I set out to make my SaaS development less annoying.
But when you're a developer who obsessively deep-dives into problem domains, and you have a genuine frustration with existing tools, and you keep pulling the thread... sometimes you accidentally build something bigger.
"I don't want to run a business."— Rich, January 2026
But I might have built one anyway.