4 Open-Source AI Tools, 1 MCP Server — What I Built and What I Learned
I shipped four AI tools last year. Nobody used them.
That's not clickbait. That's the honest number. I built an incident commander, a CI failure diagnoser, a code governance checker, and a DORA metrics dashboard. Four repos. Four CLIs. Four Slack announcements with pinned messages. I demoed them in team meetings. I sent follow-up reminders.
Adoption sat at maybe 20%. And that's being generous.
The tools weren't broken. The distribution was. Nobody wants to learn four different CLIs. Nobody reads pinned Slack messages from three months ago. Engineers live in their editor — everything else is friction. The engineer who joined last month doesn't know any of these tools exist. They're debugging an incident manually, pasting logs into Slack, asking "has anyone seen this before?" — while three of my tools sit there, ready to help, completely unused.
