For years I've been trying to get estate agents to support an open-source real estate website builder. The pitch is obvious: instead of each agent paying thousands for a bespoke site, pool resources, fund the features you all need, and everyone benefits.

Getting non-technical people to commit to something abstract before it exists is nearly impossible though. Hope a model like FablePool can change that.

For the website builder, the open-source product is already there: https://github.com/etewiah/property_web_builder. It just needs momentum.

Right now I actually think an MVP should be Maximum Viable Product. Partly because of AI but also because it shifts one's perspective to what Viable means.

The latest one is with "Uncle Bob Martin" who has some interesting takes on coding with AI from .... can I say an oldie?

Would be nice to add this as an extra data point when comparing. Are you open to collaborating at all?

For me that is absolutely stunning. Dude I would give you a big hug if I could.

While the comments are suggesting this story is about a disaster it feels like a massive feel-good story. I don't think anyone here will understand but there are tears in my eyes right now!

I grew up in Ghana in the 80s and I can pretty much guarantee that a package that looked possibly slightly valuable would no way go more than 2 steps in the postal system then.

I know that was decades ago and Uganda might be completely different but this story is still messing with my head in a way I can't explain.

I asked if he had tried out Claude code or anything similar. His answer: My company has scheduled a training course in that so I'll wait

:(

Are they perhaps working on a totally different real estate project. I am in that space and very nervous about it getting wiped out by anthropic or openAI.

To be honest, I am not sure why they still haven't make a big play for that industry.

It's like the gardener at one of the Oxford colleges said - it's really easy to create these perfect lawns, just turn up every day and trim and water it - for a couple hundred years.

I adapted my open source ruby on rails real estate website builder to work with EmDash and can already see a lot of potential.

It's not ready for production use yet but I'm really enjoying working on it:

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/emdash_property_web_bu...

I for one have found myself happily spending hundreds of dollars trying to build things I struggled to do in the past. And I am happy to keep things open source because I know the code is no longer the moat.

As an example, I started this almost 10 years ago:

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

I the past 4 days I have added more functionality to it that I ever did in all the time before.

I had some ideas on what to host on there but haven't got round to it yet. If anyone here has a good use for it feel free to pitch me...