u/Evening_Return5921 — reddlx

Started building SCNZ 10 days ago. Opened it to 20 beta users a few days in. Today I shipped about 80 commits and almost none of it was on the roadmap. It all came from what those 20 hit in the first few days of using it.

What they surfaced first wasn't the stuff I was worried about (LLM edge cases, render queue stress). It was the small UX gaps I'd been ignoring because I knew the workarounds:

A user mis-queued a render and had no way to cancel
Auto-fill ran with a blank spinner so people thought it was frozen
Stock APIs were silently failing when throttled — partial results, no message
The download button was silently broken in fresh browser sessions because I'd never tested cold
The "Scene keywords" label was barely visible against its background

Today's ship list, basically all beta-driven:

Cancel button for queued renders (real BullMQ removal, not a status flip)
Live auto-fill widget with running / done-clean / done-gaps states
Per-provider rate-limit resilience (p-limit + dead-letter + keyword cache + toast)
Smarter clip selection — duration-budget walk, exclude previously-picked on re-run, don't wipe assets on silent failure
Custom LLM model input as an escape hatch
Refreshed model list against each provider's current docs
LLM parse errors surfaced in plain English
Security pass: ownership checks, splitter auth, lavfi metacharacter escape

The thing I'm taking away from day 10: shipping early to a small group is wildly more efficient than building in private and guessing. I learned more about my own product in 4 days of beta than in 6 days of solo building.

30 seats left at scnz (.) digital