What's this about?
oran_ge shipped version 2.0 of ColaMD — Mermaid support, multi-window, custom fonts, autosave — and passed 1,000 GitHub stars. His account of it is the interesting part: he describes himself as someone who cannot really program, built it because he needed a free markdown editor when changing computers, and has advanced it one version per new model release. He credits two models by name for features he had previously found too hard, apologises to the user who lost a day's editing before autosave existed, and says the 1,500 real downloads mean more to him than the stars.
What does "one version per new model" mean in practice?
It means the project's capability is gated on frontier model releases rather than on the author's learning. Each time a stronger model ships, he attempts the features that defeated the previous one. That is a genuinely new development pattern — not faster development, but a backlog that unblocks from the outside on someone else's schedule.
Why is it worth noticing?
- He is explicit that the project outgrew its original minimal scope because word of mouth brought users with needs he had not planned for.
- He also shipped an iOS version, which he says was harder than the Mac one.
- Set against the same week's "AI-written code is still your code" thread, this is what it looks like when the author does take responsibility — including for the autosave bug.