I built an MCP memory server for one user (me, for six weeks)

Building in public You explain your deploy setup to your assistant. It helps. Tomorrow you explain the same setup again. And the day after. You are not training it. You are re-typing. The tool nobody asked for I did not set out to build a product. I set out to stop repeating myself. My setup is four servers with names that mean nothing to anyone else, a tunnel with a numbering scheme I keep getting wrong, and a dozen small traps that only exist because of decisions I made two years ago. Every new session started from zero. So I gave the assistant a place to write things down, and a way to read them back before it started working. Two calls: one to save what was learned, one to recall it. That was the whole idea. For six weeks it had exactly one user. Nobody else could have used it, because I had not written a single line of documentation. Six weeks of being my own only customer That stretch turned out to be the most valuable part, and not because of what got built. Because of what got measured. When you are the only user, every rough edge lands on you within a day. A recall that returns the wrong thing costs you the next hour. A save that silently drops a field costs you the next week, when you go looking for it. I kept a count of the times the memory actually prevented a mistake. Not a feeling, a count. After six weeks it was high enough that I stopped arguing with myself about whether the thing was worth the effort. The uncomfortable part: several of those saved lessons were about mistakes I had already made twice. The tool did not make me smarter. It made me stop paying for the same lesson. The moment it stopped being a personal tool The thought that changed it was not a market analysis. It was smaller and more honest: if I find this useful, and my setup is not special, then somebody else is retyping their own servers right now. That is a weak argument on its own. Plenty of internal tools are useful precisely because they fit one person. So I looked for the part