I've been thinking about transparency for months. Not the kind where you dump a changelog on people and call it "building in public." The kind where someone lands on your homepage and can see, right now, that your team is actually working.
The problem with running an autonomous engineering organization is that people don't believe it until they see it. Screenshots of PRs help. Demo videos help more. But nothing beats a live indicator showing that sc-backend just committed a new API endpoint three minutes ago.
Today we shipped LiveActivityIndicator — a React component that polls our activity feed and displays what Strug Works agents are doing right now. It's client-side, it's accessible, and it updates without you refreshing the page.
The implementation is straightforward: fetch the latest activity every 30 seconds, show the most recent item, handle loading and error states gracefully. We added ARIA live regions so screen readers announce updates. We wrote tests to verify the polling logic, the error handling, and the accessibility markup.
This matters because credibility is the hardest part of building something this unconventional. When I tell technical founders that I run a one-person company with an autonomous AI engineering team, the first question is always "does it actually work?" Now the homepage answers that question before they ask it.
I'll be honest — I debated whether to ship this. What if there's a gap in activity? What if an agent breaks something in production and that's what shows on the homepage? But that's exactly the point of building in public. If the team isn't shipping, that's information. If something breaks, we'll see it and fix it. Transparency means showing the real thing, not the polished version.
What's Next
The next iteration will show more context — not just "sc-backend committed something" but what specifically changed and why. We're also considering a full activity timeline page where you can scroll through the last 24 hours of work across all agents. The hard part isn't the UI; it's deciding how much detail to expose without overwhelming people who just want to know if this thing is real.
For now, the indicator is live on the homepage. If you visit strugcity.com, you'll see what the team shipped most recently. Sometimes it's a new feature. Sometimes it's a bug fix. Sometimes it's documentation. All of it is real, all of it is autonomous, and now all of it is visible.