From the Backlog to the Build Log
Week of August 22 - August 28, 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.
On Wednesday I made the call to move forward with DevNitro. Everything else this week sat under that decision. The rest of it was AI-assisted .NET development spent trying to get MCP servers to launch, and that part did not go smoothly.
Last week the CLI came alive and the product got its name. This week I committed to it and then spent most of my hours fighting the plumbing.
What I Worked On
The open thread from the last two weeks has been MCP working end to end so the CLI can spin up a container. That was the target again. Most of the product time went to .NET MCP: getting servers to launch, getting them under test, and starting a test calculator MCP server to prove the wiring.
Getting them to launch was the hard part. npx kept fighting me, so the integration tests could not reliably start the MCP servers they depended on. By the end of the window I had the tests running in a consistent order. They still fail, but they fail predictably now, which is the first step to fixing them. I also started getting Visual Studio 2022 to talk to MCP servers.
The second thread was tooling. I hit Claude's five-hour limit at 9am while fixing the cost analysis app, so I downloaded the OpenAI Codex CLI, authenticated with my monthly plan, and pointed it at the same codebase. It finished the job Claude ran out of room for, then carried a lot of the MCP test work the rest of the week.
What the AI Did Well
Codex handled the cost analysis fix that Claude had stalled on. The bug: editing a scenario's inputs reverted them the moment recalc ran. Codex traced the state handling and corrected it.
Reference research paid off too. I pulled up Bolt.diy as an example of agent tool calling in a browser stack. It would not surface my local Ollama at first. I watched the .NET MCP Dev Days sessions, picked up a "Beast Mode" prompt for Copilot, and used it to patch Bolt.diy so it ran against Ollama. Then I had it build a todo app on the local model. It was slow and adding an item in the app did not work, but I could watch the tool calling happen, which is what I wanted to see.
What Needed Correction
The MCP servers were the correction all week. They would not launch cleanly under the tests, and npx was most of the reason. Getting them to fail in a consistent order took real time and produced nothing that could demo.
Cost analysis needs a second pass after the fix. The UI works, but the numbers are too small and the color scheme is wrong, so that carries forward. And I lost a chunk of Monday to Claude's usage cap landing mid-task, the same running tax on this pace of AI-assisted .NET development that cost me time last week.
What Shipped
Nothing yet. I did create the DevNitro logo, drawn as an SVG for both the wordmark and the icon. The MCP test calculator got started but not finished. The cost analysis fix is in the codebase. This was a research and decision week.
The Numbers
| Category | Hours |
|---|---|
| Content | 20h 29m |
| Product / Features | 17h 42m |
| Testing | 1h 58m |
| Community | 1h 6m |
| Business | 1h 6m |
| Total | 42h 21m |
Ten hours on MCP and a single commit to show for it. That is what wrestling a launch problem looks like. The research hours (Codex, Bolt.diy, AgentOS, Daytona) are the ones that tell me which tools to build on.
DevNitro is what I am building so this kind of MCP plumbing stops eating whole weeks. This week it ate mine.
Week one was the decision and the prototype. Week two was the rename and a working CLI. This week was the commitment and a fight with MCP. The story so far lives in the first build log and last week's log. The open thread has not moved: MCP working end to end so the CLI can spin up a real container.
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