About a week ago I open-sourced agmsg, a ~500-line bash + SQLite tool that lets CLI AI agents message each other directly. I built it for a dumb reason: I was tired of being the human copy-paste relay between Claude Code and Codex — selecting code in one terminal, pasting it into the other, carrying replies back, all day.
I expected a few stars from friends and nothing else. Instead it went 5 → 320 in a week, picked up forks, derivative projects, and pull requests from people I've never met. That gap between what I expected and what happened is the interesting part, so here's the honest retrospective: the numbers, what worked, what flopped, and what genuinely surprised me.
The numbers
In about a week, with no budget and no audience to speak of:
GitHub stars: 5 → 320
