Sharing it: invite codes, a China edition, and a domain
Today was about one thing: how to let other people use it.
International edition: I added invite codes. A friend gets a code and can use the AI features without ever touching my key. Behind it is a relay server on Cloudflare. I'd never used Cloudflare, so Claude walked me through it click by click (v0.14).
Mainland China edition: Claude isn't available in mainland China, so this edition uses MiniMax, a Chinese model, with its relay on Alibaba Cloud (v0.15, v0.16). This was the most painful part of the day. I couldn't find a setting I needed, then hit a 403 error, and sent screenshot after screenshot until it finally worked.
In the afternoon I wrote an intro to send friends and made a step-by-step picture guide for entering the invite code. I was worried people wouldn't know where to paste it.
In the evening I thought: sending a zip file that people have to unpack is too much hassle. Why not just send a link? So the tool became a website (v0.17). I bought a domain and set up a subdomain for the test version. The China edition is served through Hong Kong on Tencent Cloud. Late at night I sat waiting for the status to change from "Deploying" to "Active". Then it said Active and still wouldn't open. It finally did, sometime after midnight.
What I learned today: the hardest part of building a product often isn't the code. It's the accounts, permissions, networks and regional restrictions.
Versions today: v0.14 invite codes (international) · v0.15 China edition (MiniMax) · v0.15.1 China translation fix · v0.16 China invite codes · v0.16.1 China relay live · v0.17 web version · v0.17.1 China website