PullMD Part 5: Reddit Day and First Issues – Simply Explained
On the morning of April 27, I made my little tool public on GitHub. One night later: a handful of stars, fourteen people had downloaded a copy, and nobody had reported a single problem.
That was the first morning I sat down to breakfast knowing the project was no longer only mine — and that nothing dramatic had happened yet.
Telling Reddit About It
The next day, just after lunch, I wrote a short post on Reddit. The community there is called r/ClaudeAI — people who use the AI assistant Claude.
My headline named two real annoyances that the tool fixes:
1. Copying text on a phone is a pain. When I’m reading a long article on my phone and want to ask Claude about it, the dance of long-pressing, dragging selection handles, switching apps, and pasting — it’s not hard, but it’s annoying.
2. The assistant wastes effort on website clutter. A typical webpage is mostly navigation bars, cookie banners, and footers. Only a small slice is the actual article. Watching the assistant chew through all that filler before answering my question started to bother me.
I had no real expectations. Just one post among thousands, on a normal Tuesday.
What Happened That Day
At the time of writing: 387 thumbs-up, 58 comments. More attention than anything I had ever posted there.
The first comment I read in the morning was this:
“What is this!? A useful and novel tool on an AI sub? Amazing!” — u/CloisteredOyster (+108)
That came early enough in the day that I could just enjoy it, without yet knowing whether anything else would follow.
What Reddit Taught Me About My Own Tool
The most interesting comment was from a user comparing my tool with a feature that Claude already has built in, called WebFetch:
“Claude code’s webfetch works differently. It passes page to Haiku model which then returns very small result which is actually added to context of Opus/Sonnet. So the reduction is not as drastic as it seems when using with agents which solved this problem.” — u/blin787 (+35)
I had never looked closely at how WebFetch works internally, because I was solving a different problem for myself. After the comment, I went and checked.
It turns out WebFetch quietly hands the whole webpage to a smaller, cheaper AI model in the background. That smaller model reads the page and writes a short summary. The main assistant only ever sees the summary — never the full page.
My tool works differently. It hands back the actual page text, word for word, without any AI summarising in between.
So the two approaches answer different questions. If you want a quick gist, the built-in feature is cheaper and faster. If you want the exact wording — every word, every table, every link — my tool is the better fit.
Reddit made me describe my own tool more clearly than I had managed on my own.
Comparison Questions Are a Gift
Two more comments asked: “Isn’t this just like that other tool over there?”
The first compared it to a service called firecrawl. Honest answer: firecrawl is a much bigger system. It can crawl an entire website at once and pull out structured data using AI. Mine does one page at a time, with no AI in the loop, but it plugs straight into Claude with no setup. Different jobs.
The second comment asked whether a tiny script on your own computer wouldn’t be enough, instead of a whole online service. Also a fair question. For one person on one machine, yes. The service makes more sense once several devices share the same cache, or when a friend uses it from their phone while I use it from my laptop. The setup costs once, then everyone benefits.
Numbers from My Own Server
People on Reddit asked for actual measurements, so I added them to the post that evening. The exact figures depend on the page, but the pattern is clear.
A long page from GitHub: shrinks to about 2% of its original size. A reference page from Mozilla’s documentation: shrinks to about a quarter. A Reddit thread: shrinks to about a tenth.
The First Real Bug Report
That same evening, at 10:56 PM, a stranger opened the very first bug report. Something my code was doing wrong, written up cleanly, with steps to reproduce.
That feels different from a thumbs-up. A thumbs-up is a moment. A bug report is work. Somebody installed the tool, ran into a problem, took the time to write it up, and submitted it. That’s a real gift.
About half an hour later, a second bug report came in from someone else. Two reports the same evening. The repository had been public for less than 48 hours.
A Flood of Issues the Next Day
In the 24 hours that followed: thirteen issues in the tracker. Not a slow trickle — one big wave while the Reddit post was still hot. Most came from strangers; two I opened myself, to capture the feedback — more on that in a moment.
A small selection of the outside reports, to show the range:
- Could there be a switch to hide the history page on shared installations?
- A German news website looks like garbled symbols in the output — something about character encoding.
- On Reddit threads with images, only the image comes through and the actual discussion is missing.
- The pre-built containers aren’t published in the public registry yet.
One person showed up several times in those first days — they’ll come back later in this series. The German news site they reported was a real edge case I probably wouldn’t have spotted that early on my own.
Over those two weeks: 397 unique visitors, 320 unique copies of the code downloaded. Reddit was by far the biggest source.
How the Feedback Reshuffled My Plan
Two of the issues didn’t come from outside — I opened them myself, with Claude Code, to bundle all the hints and wishes from the Reddit thread. The bigger one: “let several people use the tool at the same time” — logins, accounts, keeping each person’s data separate. A whole little architecture, soberly noted as “Phase 1.”
Multi-user had been a Phase 2 or 3 thing on my own roadmap, for later. But the feedback from the thread made it clear that “later” no longer held. So I wrote it down and moved it to the top.
That’s exactly what happens when you make software public: the order of features stops being entirely yours. Not because strangers dictate it, but because their feedback shifts your own judgment.
What happened next belongs to Part 6.
Part 5 of 9 in the PullMD series.
← PullMD Part 4: From My Tool to an OSS Project | PullMD Part 6: The Multi-User Pivot →