From ICP to first agent running

Repo / artifact proxies — strongest

• A versioned CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / WORKFLOW.md, plan-mode gating, test-first agent dispatch, custom hooks & status lines.
• Stars/contribs to awesome-claude-code (~49.5k★) — its top categories are orchestration, hooks, status lines.
• Uses parallel-agent tooling: workmux, claude --worktree --tmux, claudecode.nvim.

Behavioral scale — the narrow slice

• Only ~31% use AI agents at all; ~14% daily — your persona lives in that daily slice (SO 2025).
• Claude Code ≈ 41% of AI-tool users, most-loved; multi-agent power users skew ~70% Claude Code.
• Target the behavior (3+ concurrent agents, reviews merges), not a title or seniority.

Identity proxies — noisy but telling

• Terminal-native: vim/neovim ≈ 38% combined, Ghostty the crowd's terminal, tmux+worktrees the DIY substrate.
• Dual-member of r/ClaudeCode (~344k) and a terminal sub (r/neovim, r/commandline).
• High base-rate noise — use as a co-signal, never a sole filter.

Content that converts this crowd

Highest-ceiling format: the long-form, first-person engineering essay — opinionated, honest about what didn't work, real config/code. The demystifier ("here's the whole thing, simpler than the hype" — Thorsten Ball's "How to Build an Agent") and the honest postmortem (Armin Ronacher) travel furthest.

Use the crowd's own words: map isolation + the gated state machine onto Willison's "from vibe coding to agentic engineering." Sell gating as knowing what's happening — never as throttling the agent. Ship an asciinema cast / looping GIF above the fold; demo inside Ghostty/tmux to signal you're one of them.

Weeks −1 → 0 · pre-seed

• Get listed in awesome-claude-code + secondary lists.
• Line up IndyDevDan / creator outreach; email Console.dev.
• Publish the "how I run N review-first agents" demystifier essay to build baseline stars before the HN swing.
• Dogfood publicly: "Panopticon is built by agents Panopticon supervises" (78% of its own tasks).

Week 1 · the swing

• Show HN Tue–Thu ~8–10am ET; plain title, maker first comment, one honest limitation.
• Same morning: r/LocalLLaMA (architecture) + r/selfhosted ([AI], F/LOSS) + r/coolgithubprojects.
• Analytics OFF / opt-in from commit one.

Weeks 2–4 · compound

• Pitch Latent Space (orchestration beat); submit Console.dev.
• Let TLDR/Changelog pick up HN momentum.
• Publish a follow-up postmortem ("what didn't work building the control plane").
• Pragmatic Engineer only once real adoption exists.

Engineer the "aha"

The reported click is observation, not per-task speed — "watching ≥2 agents work at once, then reviewing and merging a diff." A single-agent first run undersells the whole category.

The case-study essay

"How I cleared 20 dependency upgrades in an afternoon without babysitting." First-person, demystifier voice (Thorsten-Ball register). Show the real config, the workflow state machine, one thing that didn't work. Ground it in the actual numbers: 285 tasks, ~2.44B tokens, 86% structured-flow completion, a Rails 8 upgrade shepherded across tasks.

Publish it pre-launch to seed baseline stars, then reference it in the Show HN first comment.

Dogfooding as the proof

The most credible case study is the repo itself: 78% of Panopticon's own 285 tasks were Panopticon improving Panopticon — built by the agents it supervises. That's the "80% built by Amp" move, but verifiable from your own task history.

One rule, non-negotiable: every demo must reproduce from the repo. The Devin backlash ("faking it in demos") is this crowd's canonical grudge — a real, rough, honest demo beats a polished fake every time.