Open-Core on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

Vibe Coding Open Core Out of its Lockbox III: The Source Awakens

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 20:00:00 -0400

This is the third article in a series about forking an open-core product with AI coding tools. Part 1 laid out the roadmap of what was gated behind the Pro paywall. Part 2 executed the fork: rebrand, telemetry strip, first feature. It proved the easy stuff was as easy as it looked.

Part 3 is about the stuff that isn’t easy.

Speaker diarization (identifying who said what in a meeting) is the one feature where the open source codebase and the Pro version are on even footing. The Meetily website marks it as “Coming Soon” for every tier, including Pro. Neither side has shipped it.

Vibe Coding Open Core Out of its Lockbox II: May the Fork Be With You

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:00:00 -0400

Part 1 laid out the roadmap: here’s what’s gated, here’s what it would take to ungates it, and here’s a worked example of how an AI coding agent turns a spec into real code. This part is the actual fork. Not a thought experiment. Not a hypothetical. Real commands, real diffs, real output.

Cloning and Branching

The starting point is the Meetily v0.4.0 MIT codebase. Clone it, create a branch with the fork’s name, and get ready to break things.

Vibe Coding Open Core Out of its Lockbox I: Use the Source

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 08:00:00 -0400

This is Part 1 of a series about using vibe coding to fork open-core projects. Not as an abstract argument, but as a walkthrough of a real fork, a real roadmap, and a real example.

The Vibe Coding Argument Nobody’s Making

Vibe coding gets a bad rap. The discourse is dominated by people building Yet Another Todo App with Cursor, or prompting their way into a GPT wrapper and calling it a startup. That’s fair sport for criticism, but it’s not what vibe coding is for.