Ruslan | Building apps

I'm Ruslan. I've spent 17 years writing backend code, mostly PHP, high-load systems and financial integrations. The kind of stuff where you really don't want to screw things up)) I use Codex and Claude a lot now. Getting them to write code is usually the easy part. Then I have to check what they actually did 😅 Over the last few years, I've tried launching several projects. I got most of an AI coding school built before getting stuck on finding students. A transcription app made a few sales, and I closed it anyway. Right now I'm focused on Nourmio, a calorie and sugar tracking app we built with friends. I'll share what we're building and how we try to get people to use it. There'll probably be other projects along the way too. If you're building your own thing, say hi. I'd like to hear what you're working on. sugarwise.monster/

My projects. Part 5 of 7: the app I neglected picked up around 300 installs. A while back, some friends and I built a mobile app and put it on the App Store. Then I kind of left it alone. While I wasn't giving it much attention, it picked up around 300 organic installs. That app is Nourmio. It started as a sugar tracker, then we added calorie tracking too. You can take a photo of a meal or describe it by voice, check the estimates and save it to your diary. After spending so much time on projects I ended up closing, I had this one sitting there with people already finding it. Figured it deserved more of my attention 😅 Now Nourmio is my main focus. We're improving the app, and we've got a website with SEO articles up too. I'm working on getting more people to use it and figuring out which channels are worth putting time into. I still need to understand what makes people come back after that first download. Getting installed is one thing. Becoming an app someone actually keeps using is the work ahead. For now, I want to keep going with this one. Work on the product and how people find it, rather than jump straight into building something else. Part 6: why I'm happy to build in a market that already has plenty of competitors.

65 for GPT-6.2 Astra is the prediction in the image. On the actual Artificial Analysis leaderboard, Gemini 4 Carbon is at 60 and GPT-6 Astra (max) is at 57. If 6.2 does hit 65, I’d want to see how much time and money it takes to get there. artificialanalysis.ai/leader…

A hurricane ripping up nearly 4,000 blocks in a fan-made Rust rewrite of Minecraft is a pretty fun way to stress-test a game. I’d love to see the frame-time graph right as the buildings start coming apart.

For bug fixes, I’d add this to the Claude Code prompt. “Write a test that reproduces the bug. Run it before and after the fix.” Then when it says “fixed,” you can look at the test and see what it actually checked.

I checked Polymarket after seeing that 20% figure. The weekly market was at 37% for Nov 2–8 and 33% for Nov 9–15 when I looked on Nov 4. About $86k traded across that market. The detail that’s easy to miss: the contract covers GPT Astra 6.1 or newer. Traders are guessing when the next Astra ships. The 6.2 name is still a rumor, and Fable has its own market. polymarket.com/event/when-wi…

I get the appeal. You can spend half an hour tweaking how something moves, then play the same five seconds over and over just to see if it feels right. Curious what was the first thing in this game you got working and just kept playing with?

Being able to build your own PDF tool is a real shift. For a payment app, here's the test I'd run: the bank took the money, your request timed out, and the customer tapped Pay again. What happens next?

I spent almost 7 months building an AI marketer. Then I realized one bad day at Yandex Direct could screw up the entire product 😅 My projects. Part 4 of 7. The idea was pretty simple. You tell the AI about your business. What you're selling, who your customers are, how much they usually spend. It asks a few questions, studies your audience and competitors, figures out what kind of ads might work. Then it builds a landing page, writes the ads, launches the campaign and keeps track of everything. Basically, an entire marketing team in one AI tool. And the crazy part? I was actually pretty close to finishing it. But there was one problem. Yandex Direct. Some days it worked fine for me. Other days, something would go wrong. And my entire product depended on it. Imagine paying for an AI marketer, getting a beautiful landing page, perfectly written ads... and then nothing launches because the ad platform isn't cooperating. What am I supposed to tell the customer? "Sorry, try again tomorrow"? 😅 That's when it hit me. I'd spent almost 7 months figuring out how to automate everything, but hadn't properly answered one basic question: What happens when the platform I depend on doesn't work? So yeah, I shut the project down. Not exactly the ending I was hoping for)) If I ever try something like this again, I'm doing it differently. First, run the entire process manually for one real business. See what breaks, what gets stuck and what actually works. THEN automate it. Seven months is a pretty expensive way to learn that lesson. Part 5: Nourmio. The project I actually decided to keep building.

Anthropic might be secretly testing Claude Fable 5.5, and the leaks are getting pretty interesting 👀 First, claude-fable-5-5 randomly showed up in the LiteLLM model catalog on October 13. Then it disappeared the next day. And on November 1, people spotted something even weirder: Mythos 5.5 hiding in Anthropic's own website code. Well, that's one way to tease a new model without announcing anything 😁 Meanwhile, some Claude users believe they're already being routed to a stronger unreleased model. There are also rumors that the next Fable could be much better at understanding what you actually want, without needing a 500-line prompt explaining every little detail. Now THAT would be interesting. Imagine telling Claude to build something and having it actually understand the requirements instead of confidently inventing half of them)) But here's the catch. No official announcement. No confirmed benchmarks. No release date. And nobody has proven those impressive demos actually came from Fable 5.5. Reddit is already debating whether better AI should guess what you mean or just be smart enough to ask when something isn't clear. Personally, I'd love to throw it at a massive PHP backend project. Give it a complicated task, let it work for a few hours, and see if it can actually finish without losing context or making a mess. Because at this point, I don't need another model that can generate a beautiful demo in 30 seconds. I need one that can survive a real codebase without giving me a headache 😅 Between GPT-6.2 Astra and Fable 5.5, things could get pretty damn interesting. Now we just need someone to actually release one of them.

Looks like Codex accidentally leaked GPT-6.2 Astra before OpenAI could even announce it 😁 People started sharing screenshots of their Codex usage stats, and guess what showed up? gpt-6.2-astra. The funny part? Codex still shows regular Astra in the model picker, but some users are already seeing 6.2 in their usage reports. No official announcement yet, but something’s definitely going on)) And here’s where it gets interesting. Remember GPT-6.1 Astra? The one that was supposed to launch in October but got canceled over safety concerns? Apparently, the model had issues respecting permissions and accurately reporting what it had done. Now people are wondering if 6.2 is basically that model after some serious fixing. And just yesterday, OpenAI shared results from an unnamed internal model scoring 0.875 on BenchCAD 2.0, compared to 0.594 for the current Astra. Nobody has confirmed it’s GPT-6.2, though. Meanwhile, Reddit is already having a good laugh. People are basically saying, “How about fixing the damn usage limits before dropping an even hungrier model?” 😅 Personally, I just wanna throw it at a massive backend project and see what happens. Can it actually handle long-running tasks, keep track of context, and stop touching files nobody asked it to touch? Or is it just gonna burn through my weekly limit even faster?)) Either way, something’s cooking. No confirmed release date yet, but the GPT-6.2 Astra rumors are getting pretty interesting.

The GPT-6.2 Astra rumor started on the Codex usage page 😅 On Nov 1, users shared screenshots listing gpt-6.2-astra while the picker still said GPT-6 Astra. One screenshot put 6.2 at 19.8% of that account’s usage. That’s why people think OpenAI may be testing it on some requests. Some people on X think it could drop this week (Nov 2–8). I get why the screenshots got people excited, but OpenAI hasn’t announced a date. Tibo posted “Le GPT Fat” today, and some people read that as a hint that Astra could drop Nov 3. I’ve also seen guesses of 10 trillion parameters and pricing around Opus 5.5. His post gives no date, size or price. For comparison, the current GPT-6 Astra is officially $10 in and $50 out per million tokens. Then there’s the pelican on a bike below and a 3D RPG someone says came from one prompt. Fun demos, though the model behind each run is still unclear. Anyone seeing gpt-6.2-astra in their own Codex usage now?

Four models got the same RPG prompt. The clip below is why people are talking about Fable 5.5 again. The build labeled Fable 5.5 has moving grass and smoother combat than the 5.1 run. The author says they got it through routing, so the model behind that run is still a guess. A Fable 5.5 entry also briefly showed up in LiteLLM’s Azure catalog in October. It copied the 5.1 specs and was pulled after a test call returned 404. So I’d take any leaked price or context limit with a grain of salt. I’m watching Anthropic’s Claude event on Nov 10. The agenda doesn’t name Fable 5.5, and there’s no public release date yet. What I’d actually want to try in Claude Code: give it an existing game, change one combat rule and see if the rest still works.

My projects. Part 3 of 7: Why I shut down my AI crypto trading bot I built a bot that used AI to trade crypto. It had stretches where things went really well. Then it had stretches where they really didn't. I'd already put time into building it and spent money getting the word out. But the more I thought about taking it further, the more I kept coming back to one question. How would I feel watching it go through a bad stretch with somebody else's money on the line? Those swings were enough to make me want out. I wasn't comfortable asking anyone else to ride them with me. So I shut it down. Part 4 is about the AI marketer I spent almost seven months building. I got it close to ready, then started asking what would happen if the one ad channel it depended on stopped working.

I looked up what gpu-unlock actually did for someone running vLLM on an RTX 3090. Their model processed the prompt 33% faster. Once it started writing the answer, it was only 1.2% faster 😅 The unlock lifts a speed limit on some Tensor Core operations, which can help the GPU work through a long prompt. Once the model is writing, it can still be stuck waiting for data from GPU memory. If I tried it, I'd run the same long prompt before and after and see how long I wait for the answer to start. For ComfyUI I'd just time the same image workflow. github.com/Zagitta/gpu-unloc…

An AI answer can be correct and still be a pain in the ass to read. If I ask about a small bug, I want to find the proposed fix quickly. A wall of text turns a small question into another job. Explain why the fix works. Mention the catch if there is one. Then let me get back to building. That's what I care about when choosing a model. I don't want every chat to end with me saying "okay, now write that like a normal person" 😅

This looks pretty damn good 😅 Now I want to see the project behind it. Can we move the fox to the other side and change the lighting without rebuilding everything? For an app launch, I'd want that same control over the screens and text. The app changes, the video needs an update, and I really don't want to start from scratch every time. I can't tell which model made this from a finished clip. The replies are arguing about that too. Show the run and the editable project. That's the bit I'd like to see next.

My projects. Part 2 of 7: The app made a few sales. I closed it anyway. After the coding school, I built a transcription app and ran ads through Yandex Direct. Got some leads and made about four sales. Honestly, I wasn't even expecting people to pay that quickly. Seeing money land in the account felt pretty damn good 😅 But I wasn't excited about taking it further. Getting more customers just didn't feel like something I wanted to put my time into. I'd picked a popular idea and decided to give it a go. Built it, launched it, waited to see what would happen. I hadn't thought much about what I'd do if it actually worked. Then a few people paid. And I realised I didn't want to keep running it. So I shut it down. Looking back, I think I chose something I wanted to try building, without really thinking about whether I wanted the business that came with it. Ever had a project make its first sales and still thought, "yeah, I don't want to keep doing this"? Part 3: the AI crypto trading bot. That one gave me a different reason to stop.