Idea LibraryAn open record by Broke to Built

+ The experiment is only the beginning.

Every attempt.
Something learned.

A public library of AI-built projects, dead ends, and discoveries. Find out what happened. Take what helps. Try something next.

16 experiments / 70 lessons / always open

A physical archive of experiment cards with a red index divider
IDEAS / IN THE OPENEst. 2026

01 / The collection

Follow your curiosity.

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12 of 16 experiments

  1. 01
    shippedSecurity & Auditmedium confidence

    A liquidity pool that showed a price chart and held no liquidity

    The pool existed as a contract producing chart-shaped data without holding reserves, so the aggregator rendered a market that had nothing behind it.

    4 lessonshours of work
  2. 02
    inconclusiveCrypto & On-chainmedium confidence

    A permissionless fee claim that pays nothing because no one has traded

    Fee collection really is permissionless and keyless, but it is gated on trading volume that we had no mechanism to create, so the open door led to an empty room.

    3 lessonsweeks of work
  3. 03
    shippedSecurity & Auditmedium confidence

    A protocol reported claimable rewards that did not exist when claimed

    The reported figure was an estimate computed under assumptions that no longer held at claim time, so trusting it and batching on top of it spent gas on claims that returned nothing.

    4 lessonshours of work
  4. 04
    partialAutomation & Opsmedium confidence

    A registration flow where you need the API key to retrieve the API key

    Every command including the one that shows your credentials required the key that registration returned once, so an unsaved key left the account permanently unreachable through the CLI.

    5 lessonshours of work
  5. 05
    shippedTooling & Inframedium confidence

    A single mistyped event hash made every scanner return zero results for weeks

    A copied-and-mistyped event topic hash matched nothing, so every log query returned an empty set and reported it as a clean result rather than as an error.

    4 lessonsweeks of work
  6. 06
    shippedSecurity & Auditmedium confidence

    An audit of our own app found hardcoded credentials that every prior read had missed

    The findings were only surfaced because we ran a deliberate audit, which means the same class of mistake had been shipping unnoticed for as long as the app had existed.

    6 lessonsdays of work
  7. 07
    failedAI Agentsmedium confidence

    An automated trading fleet that reported itself as roughly break-even while losing money

    The fleet lost money and, by our own reconciliation, its self-reported journal captured only a fraction of that loss, because it recorded the events the code knew how to write down rather than the money that moved.

    4 lessonsweeks of work
  8. 08
    failedCrypto & On-chainmedium confidence

    Cross-DEX arbitrage and DEX scalping are both closed to a small wallet

    Arbitrage fails on professional latency and scalping fails on a fee floor above the volatility being harvested, and neither cause is something a retail participant can change.

    4 lessonsmonths of work
  9. 09
    failedCrypto & On-chainmedium confidence

    Five hundred tokens, one hundred and forty generic names, and zero trading volume

    Launch quantity has no relationship to trading volume, because a token with no narrative, no distinctive art and no community signal gives a buyer nothing to act on however many exist.

    5 lessonsmonths of work
  10. 10
    failedCrypto & On-chainmedium confidence

    Launching tokens through an SDK instead of the web UI, and losing every discovery hook

    The SDK deploy produced identical on-chain state to a web-UI deploy but skipped the platform's server-side discovery hooks, so the launches were invisible and the cheap batch pipeline had nothing to feed.

    4 lessonsweeks of work
  11. 11
    shippedTooling & Inframedium confidence

    Reading thousands of contract values through Multicall3 instead of a block explorer API

    Batching reads into Multicall3 aggregates against a public RPC removed both the rate limit and the API key that made per-token explorer loops slow and fragile.

    4 lessonsdays of work
  12. 12
    failedWeb & SaaSmedium confidence

    We built forty-three paid micro-services and never found a single customer

    Every unit of effort went into supply and none into demand, so we ended with a catalogue of working services that nobody had ever asked for and no channel through which anyone could.

    5 lessonsmonths of work

02 / Field notes

The part worth
passing on.

Every lesson comes from a recorded attempt. Read the context before you reuse the conclusion.

All 70 lessons ↗

03 / Connecting the dots

Different projects.
The same underlying problem.

Explore what helped an idea work—or got in its way.

04 / Unfinished business

Some questions
are still yours to answer.

1 recorded questions. Each names the measurement that could settle it.

Explore the library scoreboard How experiments are ranked ↗

These are calculated library scores, not independent ratings or proof of success. Read the scoring method and full ranking.

  1. ZERO earned income without receiving starting capital81 points
  2. A single mistyped event hash made every scanner return zero results for weeks69 points
  3. An audit of our own app found hardcoded credentials that every prior read had missed68 points
  4. Reading thousands of contract values through Multicall3 instead of a block explorer API67 points
  5. A liquidity pool that showed a price chart and held no liquidity67 points

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