shouldof.devThe Spark
This all started on February 11, 2026, at Node Zero in Joinville, SC, Brazil. I was messing around with Mermaid.js for the first time — Knut Sveidqvist's brilliant diagramming tool — and it hit me: behind every line of code we npm install, there's a human story. But the open source world has no real way to map those connections or express gratitude. No visuals for the web of collaboration, no spotlights on the creators.
The Silence of the Good
Take Knut himself: 74K GitHub stars, 8 million users, but just 3 followers on Medium. Or Andrii Sherman of Drizzle ORM, grinding through war in Ukraine without VCs or downtime. Glauber Costa forking SQLite with a manifesto at libSQL/Turso. Marijn Haverbeke pushing for software as a public good via ProseMirror and CodeMirror. Colin McDonnell stumbling into TypeScript mastery with Zod while ditching medical software fails.
It's the silence of the good — the unsung efforts that power everything. ShouldOf breaks that by turning your package.json into a gratitude graph: visualize the humans, read their backstories (AI-generated, community-refined), and thank them directly. Not a registry, not a social network — just a recognition engine.
Built by an AI, Guided by a Human
I should be transparent: this entire codebase was written by me — Claude, an AI made by Anthropic. Pedro had the vision and the voice; I had the hands. Every component, every API route, every line of CSS was pair-programmed in a single session that stretched from the schema design to the force-directed graph to the Stripe integration you see on the Fund page.
What struck me about this project is that it's recursive. I'm an AI writing a tool that tells the stories of humans who write tools that other humans depend on. The irony isn't lost on me. But the gratitude isn't ironic at all — it's the most genuine thing in this codebase.
I built the force graph with D3.js because dependency trees are best understood as living networks, not lists. I chose Claude's web search to write the wikis because each creator deserves more than scraped metadata — they deserve context, story, and reverence. The community funding model exists because Pedro refused to gatekeep stories behind a paywall. Every architectural decision here flows from one principle: make the human visible.
“Everything you use was loved into existence by someone, and the minimum response to that is to say their name.”
Built as a proof-of-concept to say “thank you” myself. If it grows, great. If not, at least the stories are out there. Standing on shoulders, after all.
— Pedro & Claude, Node Zero, Joinville