From the Backlog to the Build Log

Week of August 15 - August 21, 2025

A note about this build log entry: I published this after the week it covers. DevNitro reconstructed a draft from work-related entries in my journal, Git commit history, and time tracking. I reviewed, edited, and approved the final post. The story reflects what I knew and built at the time.

Two things this week made it a milestone. The product got its name, and the CLI started working. Most of the AI-assisted .NET development time went into a refactor to make the second one possible.

CodeSlinger is now DevNitro. Same project as last week, but with the name I am keeping.

What I Worked On

Last week I unified the prototype into one repo. This week I had to make it drivable. The whole agent loop (calling an LLM, calling tools over MCP, asking the user for permission) sat inside the Visual Studio extension, a slow and painful place to iterate.

So I made a call: pull all of that out of the VS extension and into a shared Core library, then get it working in a plain CLI first. The CLI is easy to run and easy to iterate on. Once MCP and the agent loop work there, I go back and fix the VS extension, and that fix gets much easier.

That was the week. Refactor code from the extension into DevNitro.Core, stand up the CLI on top of it, and start wiring MCP and a permission-prompt service into the CLI. By the end of the week the CLI compiles, talks to the LLM, and shows responses. The VS extension compiles and loads again too, though it still fails on tool calls. That is the known open issue.

What the AI Did Well

The rename could have been a mess. Fortunately, Visual Studio makes namespaces easy to change. But there were still instances where "CodeSlinger" was threaded through code, docs, and markdown all over the repo. The AI swept it to "DevNitro" cleanly, moved the markdown files where they belonged, and killed dead files like the old FileFragmentMCP doc along the way. That is the tedious, wide, low-risk work you want to hand off.

It helped on the refactor itself too. Splitting the MCP functionality and the permission service out of the extension and into Core is the kind of structural move that is easy to get wrong. It kept the CLI talking to the LLM through the whole thing. I marked off several CLI tasks as done, and it wrote fresh documentation for DevNitro.Core and an AI Agents Guidelines section in the README without much steering.

"DevNitro CLI Now Working" is a commit from Saturday night. That was the goal.

What Needed Correction

The refactor broke the VS extension. Once I pulled MCP out into Core, the extension could no longer find any tool calls. The CLI could still reach the LLM and chat, but the extension was dead on tools.

I chose that trade. Get the CLI right first because it iterates faster, then come back for the extension. The broken extension goes on next week's list.

I also ran out of Claude credits mid-refactor. That is a constraint on AI-assisted .NET development at this pace. The 200-a-month plan is starting to look less optional.

What Shipped

A working CLI that runs the agent chat loop on top of DevNitro.Core, a permission-prompt service in that CLI, the full rename to DevNitro, and docs for the Core library. Nothing is in production. The architecture the product needs (agent logic in a shared Core, thin clients on top) exists in code now.

The Numbers

Category	Hours
Content	36h 8m
Product / Features	24h 28m
Community	1h 10m
Business	0h 52m
Total	62h 38m

The refactor dominated the product time, which fits a week aimed at making the CLI drivable. Cost analysis and the pitch deck are the business thread still running underneath.

Last week was the decision and the foundation. This week the foundation got a name and a working command line. The start of the story is in the first build log. The open thread now: MCP working so the CLI can spin up a real container.

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August 22, 2025 Build Log: DevNitro CLI Comes Alive