I built these tools for myself. Then other people downloaded them.
Four packages that started as things I wanted on my own machine now add up to 1,831 weekly downloads on npm. That isn't 1,831 people, and it still feels enormous.
I have four packages on npm. This week I looked at their download counters and couldn't stop smiling.
| Package | Weekly downloads |
| --- | --- |
| wonder-wagon-ui | 681 |
| create-lorekeeper | 680 |
| create-pathfinder | 262 |
| forge-local-ai-kit | 208 |
| Total | 1,831 |
None of them started as a product.
They were for me
Lorekeeper started with a note I couldn't find. I knew I had written the answer down somewhere in my Markdown, and I wanted a command that would hand me the passage. Offline, no API key.
Pathfinder is the workflow kit I use to build with AI agents without handing them the keys. It does the repetitive parts of delivery and leaves the decisions with me.
Forge is the plumbing I pulled out of LAMA, the old Mac I turned into an AI server, once I noticed every app I wrote was going to need the same timeouts and errors to talk to a local model.
Wonder Wagon UI is the design system that makes the other three look like they belong to the same family. It's the least practical of the four, and it's the most downloaded. I don't understand that, and I like it.
It's also exactly one download ahead of Lorekeeper. Neither depends on the other. I have no theory. I just keep checking.
What the numbers are not
1,831 is not 1,831 people.
npm counts downloads, not humans. A CI pipeline that installs a package on every run counts every time. So do registry mirrors, so do bots, and so do my own machines. The two create- packages are installers you run with npx, so one curious person trying it twice is two downloads.
I don't know how many of these are real developers, and I'm not going to pretend I do.
What they are
What I do know is roughly how often I install my own packages, and it isn't 1,831 times a week.
So the rest is somebody else. Some of it is surely a robot. Some of it, I'd like to think, is a person who typed npx create-lorekeeper and pointed it at their own notes, or tried Pathfinder on a real repository just to see what it would do.
I'll never know which. That's fine. The thing that gets me is simpler: these tools left my laptop. They're running, or at least being unpacked, on machines I'll never see, for reasons I'll never hear about.
Building for yourself is a closed loop. You have the problem, you write the fix, you're the only user, and the only feedback is whether it works for you. A download counter cracks that loop open just a little. It's a conversation where I only hear one side, and the side I hear is a number going up.
Small number, big feeling
1,831 is not a big internet number. Plenty of packages do that before lunch.
But I made these. I named the commands, picked the colours, wrote the docs, broke a release pipeline and fixed it. Every one of those downloads lands on something I sat down and built because I wanted it to exist.
From where I'm sitting, it's enormous.