How I built Shape in 6 months

I had the idea for Shape about 6 months ago.

At the start, development was painfully slow. I’d build something, look at it, hate the UI, change it, then change it again 5 minutes later.

The UI looked absolutely horrible.

I also ran into some of the simplest bugs that somehow became incredibly difficult to fix (a basic terminal height bug took me an entire week).

But slowly, things started coming together. The UI got better, the bugs got fixed, and the product started feeling like an actual product instead of a collection of things that happened to work.

The hardest part, though, wasn’t development.

It was getting everything into production.

Managing API keys, environment variables, production builds, deployments, databases, services and all the little things that you never really think about when you're developing locally was a completely different challenge.

Something that worked perfectly on my machine could suddenly break in production for a reason that took hours to figure out.

And after all of that, I actually finished it.

Shape is an agentic IDE for designers and programmers, bringing design, code, Git and AI into one workspace.

It’s still very early, and there’s definitely a lot I want to improve.

But after 6 months of building, breaking things, redesigning things, fixing ridiculous bugs and finally getting everything running in production, I’m really happy to have it out there.

If you try it, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think, especially what feels confusing, unnecessary, or could be better.

https://www.useshape.org/

Its also source-available
https://github.com/useshape/Shape