Case Study
Open-Source VS Code Extension | 174K+ Installs | TypeScript
vscode-snippet pulls code snippets from cht.sh straight into the editor, for Python, JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Go, Rust and anything else. It has more than 174,000 installs on the VS Code Marketplace and has been maintained since 2018.
I am a co-maintainer. 106 commits and 6,300+ lines contributed, which makes me the second-highest human contributor after the original author. I review incoming pull requests, triage issues and cut the releases.
How it works
Shipping to strangers changes how you work
When a demo breaks, you are the one who notices. When something with 174,000 installs breaks, a stranger reports it within hours, in public, usually on a configuration you have never seen.
That is where my habits around automated testing came from, and it is why I am wary of AI systems that only ever get tested by the person who built them. Real users find the paths you did not think of, and they find them fast.
What co-maintaining actually involves
Most of it is not writing features. It is reading other people's pull requests, working out whether an issue is a bug or a misunderstanding, keeping the thing zero-configuration so it still works out of the box, and cutting releases that do not regress.
TypeScript, MIT licensed, still going.
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