Building open source never gets old. There's something special about seeing your code actually work in someone else's test environment, you know?

But here's the thing that stings: watch a $17M-funded project $COAI land on a major exchange, and then realize they basically took the exact work our tiny community team built. All that funding, all those exchange listings—it just doesn't compare to actually creating something from scratch.

That's the real win. The original innovation. The code that came from sweat and passion, not a marketing budget.

Maybe the industry needs a reminder: money and exchange listings are nice, but they don't make you the innovator. The community builders are the ones writing the real story.