Home/Sample reports/CREDIBILITY.md

Credibility plan — proof for a young, honest, solo project

A real report, run against this repo — dogfood output, committed unedited. This is the artifact every brief ends in: findings that cite their evidence, ranked by severity, with a fix sketch each.

Status of the four "needs real assets/data/identity" items from the PROOF and SHOWCASE audits, and the approach for each. Snapshot of the state that shapes every call: repo is days old, 0 stars / 0 forks, solo maintainer, Discussions off, privacy-first ("nothing leaves your machine").

The through-line

At this stage credibility can't come from social proof we don't have yet — a "0 stars" badge or an unlinkable "Hacker News" quote would both backfire and betray the honesty that is the product's actual edge. So the strategy is:

Show the product is real and works (a demo + a real maker), and build the proof mechanisms so social proof surfaces automatically the moment it's genuine — never faked, never premature.

Two items ship now; two are armed to fill with real data as it accrues. Nothing is fabricated.


1. Product demo — SHOWCASE F1 · held for a real recording

With no stars or quotes yet, a short clip of a brief actually auditing a repo is the strongest proof we can own. A real recording beats any CSS reconstruction, and it's a ~15-minute task — so this is deliberately held for that asset rather than shipped as a stand-in an agent can't visually vet.

Recording recipe (10–15s, drop it in the Payoff or hero):

  • Open Claude Code (or Cursor) on a small, real sample repo with a couple of

genuine bugs.

  • Copy 01 · Bug Hunt from the catalog and paste it into the agent.
  • Screen-record: paste → the agent audits read-only → BUGS.md is written with

ranked, cited findings. Trim to the paste-through-report beat.

  • Export as muted MP4 + WebM with a poster frame (not a GIF — a 10s GIF is

5–15 MB and grainy; the video is ~0.5–1 MB and crisp).

  • Send it over; it gets wired in responsively — prefers-reduced-motion shows

the poster only, lazy-loaded, placed to protect first paint.

Fallback if you'd rather not record: an honest CSS/SVG reconstruction of the same flow using real brief + real report text, clearly a stylized demo. Say the word and it ships as a placeholder until the recording exists.

2. Maintainer identity — PROOF F5 · shipped (handle level)

A genuine first-person maker out-converts an anonymous catalog, and forcing a legal name on a handle-based identity would be wrong. Shipped now: a footer line "Built by @GhostlyGawd, an independent developer" — real, public, invented nothing.

To strengthen (your words): a 1–2 sentence origin note (e.g. "I got tired of re-explaining the same audit to my agent, so I wrote the good ones down") and, if you want to go un-pseudonymous, a real name + photo + link. Send them and they get added; nothing is invented in the meantime.

3. Adoption metric — PROOF F2 · armed, hidden at 0

A live stars badge would advertise a zero and fire an external request on a privacy-first site. So the mechanism is built to stay silent until it's real:

  • metrics.json holds the true star/fork count; build.py bakes it into the

static page (no runtime request) and renders the badge only at/above STAR_THRESHOLD (25). Below that: nothing. Today (0 stars) it shows nothing.

  • scripts/refresh-stars.py (stdlib) refreshes metrics.json from the live repo

on demand / in a deploy hook, keeping the build itself offline + deterministic.

  • The real work is earning the first stars (a launch / "Show HN"); the badge

follows adoption, it can't manufacture it.

Durable upgrade later: publish the MCP server / installer to npm → an honest, growing downloads count (also clears the IMPROVEMENTS npm item). No "used by" logos — there are no real partners (the partner band is a labeled mock).

Needs you: confirm the threshold (default 25), and a yes/no on npm publish.

4. Developer quotes — PROOF F3 · honest paraphrase kept; pipeline to real

A days-old repo has no real HN thread, so the quotes are representative, not sourced. The only honest states are real + linked or clearly paraphrased — an HN attribution with no link reads as fabricated. Kept as representative sentiment (no faux attribution). To move toward real, linked quotes:

  • Enable GitHub Discussions (currently off); the footer already carries a soft

"using it? tell me how ↗" prompt (points at Issues until Discussions is on).

  • Search HN / Reddit / X for genuine mentions; link any real one verbatim.
  • Swap paraphrased → real + linked as they arrive.

Needs you: are the three quotes real (send links) or illustrative (keep paraphrased)? And OK to enable Discussions?


Decisions that unlock the rest

  • The demo recording (recipe above) — the single biggest unlock.
  • One sentence on why you built it (+ optional real name/photo).
  • Star threshold + npm publish yes/no.
  • Quotes real-or-illustrative, and enable Discussions.