E.g. I have personal forks of mosh and cmux, each took maybe 1 hour of my time total?
I found this article https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156111 resonating with me, except I obviously don't do stuff like "nightly cron to sync with main", I just never touch the code unless it breaks or I want a new feature.
The code is here: https://code.pecheny.me/pecheny/cmux or if you prefer github, https://github.com/alexander-pecheny/cmux
I think I only added two features, pasting images over mosh (ssh already worked but not mosh) and a compact version of sidebar.
The story behind the fork is: I had a bug with raycast, filed a PR that fixed it for me https://github.com/manaflow-ai/cmux/pull/2435, a different fix made it into next release that for me didn't work. Maybe the problem was on my side, but at this point it was easier to fork the working version than debug further.
Genuine question - why?
It doesn't have to be that way. YC partners are supportive if you just want to take the YC funding and nothing more, keeping the team small and just focusing on making the product better for customers. Indeed YC advises against taking VC if you don't need it.
I have such mixed feelings about this - YC means VC means commercialization means enshitification. I really wish that weren't the case, but it so very often is.
Here's hoping this one's different...
(PS I am a big YC fan in general! I don't mean to sound anti-YC or anti-VC or anti-capitalism. But when it comes to low-level essential development tools, I'll never forget what happened to Warp, which started out as such a nice clean terminal project and turned into an absolute money-chasing mess.)