It's a gold rush

Two days ago this was a sentence: everyone is selling shovels, and nobody is keeping score.

AI made it free to produce things that look like tools. Launch pages are beautiful. Demos are cinematic. Testimonials are generated. The one thing that can't be faked is whether anyone actually uses the thing — so that became the product.

The mechanic

A deck of cards. One tool per card. Stack it if you use it, skip it if you don't.

Three rules make the numbers mean something:

1. Votes are blind. You never see the score before you call it. No herding.
2. Stacks are signed, skips are secret. Endorsement needs a face; honesty needs privacy. Nobody gets dunked on, and no one can buy applause.
3. Rankings are never for sale. Sponsors can buy a clearly-marked card or the ticker. They cannot buy position. The day a number can be bought, every number dies.

One human, one vote. Counts, not percentages. A tool with 327 stacks means 327 real people said "I use this" with their name attached.

The build

Day one was the whole product: the deck, the board, X-connected profiles, the catalog. Shipped by evening, tweeted, and the first hundred strangers found every bug worth finding — cards re-dealt mid-session, icons that wouldn't load, a vote that flipped itself. Fixed live while the deck kept dealing.

Then the tweet came down. Not because it failed — because it worked well enough to deserve a better launch. The quiet day after was for hardening: a durable icon pipeline, one-human-one-vote across devices, profiles that hold still, search, an approval queue for submissions.

Relaunched the next morning. Ten thousand calls by dinner.

What the numbers say so far

Two days in: 19,000+ calls, 4,000+ stacks, 440+ humans, 80+ connected profiles, 400+ tools in the deck — a dozen of them submitted by players, because failed searches end with a submit button.

The early verdicts are already interesting. The harshest judge on the site stacks 3% of what he sees. Claude Code sits in the board's top tier next to tools twenty years older. And people write the best one-liners when you catch them right after the swipe: the prompt isn't "review this," it's "why do you use this?"

Where this goes

The stack is becoming an identity object — your profile is the tools you run on, the reasons why, and the work you've shipped with them. Receipts, not claims. After that: how tools chain together. The workflows people actually ship with.

The process is the product. This log is the process.

— Shovel Stack, day two