Jan Wilmake

Jan Wilmake (born 20 August 1993, Netherlands) is a Dutch software developer, entrepreneur, and AI researcher primarily known for building developer tools and AI-powered products. He is based in Groningen, Netherlands, and operates under the company name Code_From_Anywhere.

Early Life and Education

Wilmake grew up in Vries, a village in the Dutch province of Drenthe, near Groningen.^[1] He demonstrated an early aptitude for programming: at the age of twelve (2006), he launched MasterCrimeZ, a text-based multiplayer browser game built in PHP that reached over 500 daily active users and generated revenues exceeding €2,000 per month at its peak.^[2]

He pursued a Bachelor of Science in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen (RUG), graduating in 2016.^[3] During his studies he continued freelancing and maintained personal software projects.

Career Overview

Early Freelancing and Nomadic Period (2016–2021)

Following graduation, Wilmake embraced the Digital_Nomad_Lifestyle, traveling through Nepal, Southeast Asia, Spain, and wider Europe while attempting to bootstrap independent software products.^[3] Key ventures during this period included Communify, a React Native app for co-working communities, and the early versions of MasterCrimeZ.

In 2018, he briefly held employment at Target Holding and BenCompare/Topicus (both Groningen) before returning to freelancing. A short-lived role at MYPO (Amsterdam) in early 2019 ended after one month. He continued as a freelance developer at DYME, a fintech startup, until August 2019.^[1]

During early 2024, Wilmake worked briefly for Minion.ai (San Francisco, remote), a browser automation and agentic AI startup, before a one-month trial ending in April 2024. He subsequently took a contract role at Slimmer_AI (Groningen), embedded in their ClaimWise venture as a senior developer at €90/hour from May 13 to July 16, 2024, when the contract ended early due to team dynamics.^{[4] [5]}

Code From Anywhere (2021–2023)

In April 2021, Wilmake founded Code_From_Anywhere (CFA), a distributed developer agency and collective.^[6] CFA generated approximately €129,000 in revenue within its first five months of operation, working with clients across Europe. The agency ran a notable bootcamp in Nepal in late 2022, employing and training local developers.^[6]

AI Products Era (2022–2025)

Following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Wilmake pivoted sharply toward AI-native products.^[6] In early 2023 he launched Chat_AI, a WhatsApp-based ChatGPT bot that grew to over 4,000 users within weeks. He subsequently built ActionSchema, an AI-powered spreadsheet and data-pipeline tool, and Screenless, a platform for AI-powered phone call transcription integrated with OpenAI's GPT systems.

In parallel, he developed uithub, a GitHub repository viewer that went viral three separate times — October 2024, December 2024 (predominantly Japanese traffic), and March 2025 — each generating over 100,000 pageviews.^[7] Between spikes, steady daily active users of 500–2,000 were recorded.^[7] In March 2025, openapisearch went viral alongside uithub. He supervised four software engineering students from the University of Groningen on uithub-related tooling from February to June 2025.^[8]

In early 2025, Wilmake held ongoing partnership negotiations with Cloudflare including a proposed 6-month DevRel sponsorship arrangement; these were ultimately not formalised. He also engaged in discussions with Stripe and, separately, with Parallel AI.^[9] In April 2025, he was in contact with Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt / Weekend Fund) and Ben Tossell about a $250,000 pre-seed raise for uithub.^[7]

During the summer of 2024, following his dismissal from Slimmer.ai in July 2024, Wilmake worked full-time on ActionSchema from outdoor locations around Groningen — the Zeegse duinen, the Gieten heath, and local parks — combining nature-based working with intensive product development.^[4]

During 2025 Wilmake declined numerous employment offers — including approaches from Skyfire, ComposioDev, StackOne, and SocialDatabase — in favour of continued independent work and product development.^[10] In May 2025, a trial week at Iterate.com yielded approximately $3,600 but he declined the full-time offer. Investor Ben Tossell expressed interest in backing his work the same month.^[10] Upstash began sponsoring uithub at $100/month from May 2025.^[10]

Parallel AI (2025)

From approximately August to November 2025, Wilmake worked as a DevRel contractor at Parallel_AI, focusing on Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations, context tooling, and Cloudflare-based infrastructure.^[8] He was simultaneously approached by mail0 (a Cloudflare Durable Objects email project) in July 2025 for a separate contract engagement.^[10]

Post-Parallel Recovery and 2026 Projects (December 2025 – April 2026)

After a hospitalisation in late November 2025, Wilmake returned home in December 2025 and began a recovery period. He rebuilt uithub with a new monetisation model (login required, $20 for private repos), migrated it fully to Cloudflare Workers, and resumed building.^[11]

In late December 2025, he started his blog at blog.janwilmake.com — an agent-friendly blogging service with built-in RSS feed where all posts are markdown files hosted in GitHub.^[12] He also shipped Dashboard for GitHub (dashboard.forgithub.com) and Context for GitHub (context.forgithub.com) on December 30, 2025.^[13]

In December 2025, Wilmake began using Claude Code for the first time, describing himself as "behind".^[14]

In January 2026, he shipped Cloudflare Skills (npx skills add janwilmake/cloudflare-skills) — a skill package for building high-quality Cloudflare Workers without mistakes.^[15] He also created a browser-based remote MCP client at mcpchat.wilmake.com and live-streamed the development on X.^[16]

He shipped gcombinator in January 2026 — a tool that changes 'y' to 'g' in Hacker News URLs (gcombinator.com) to get full article context with comments.^[17]

In February 2026, Wilmake launched a scalable browser MCP (Playwright-based, $0.01/action) as a micro-SaaS, advertising beta users via DM.^[18] He also shipped ContextArea (contextarea.com) — a web-based context engineering and MCP client tool allowing users to add URLs as context and tag MCP servers via @.^[19] ContextArea became an MCP itself, exposing tools to list activated MCP servers and run sub-agents.

He built bash-mcp (bashmcp.wilmake.com) — an MCP giving users their own 10GB filesystem and bash access via X login.^[20]

In March 2026, he launched Markdown Browser (markdownbrowser.com) — described as "a browser for the second web" — showing the markdown view of any URL alongside llms.txt navigation. This became a significant announcement with detailed launch thread.^[21]

He started OpenPolsia on March 22, 2026 — an open-source variant of Polsia with features including task execution, email, bash on documents, and multi-business support.^[22]

He also built a Cloudflare Sandbox (github.com/janwilmake/sandbox) — a sandbox where the user is pre-logged into their own stripe, git, gh, and wrangler, with the terminal exposed as an AI tool.^[23]

April 2026: Knowledge Base Products

On April 5, 2026, Wilmake responded to Andrej Karpathy's viral thread on LLM knowledge bases, noting he had been building spec-first knowledge systems for over two years.^[24]

On April 7, 2026 he launched Grok_Thyself (grokthyself.com) — a tool that continuously syncs X posts, bookmarks, and likes to a private GitHub repository, creating an AI-queryable personal knowledge base. The launch achieved 185 likes, 290 bookmarks, 40 sign-ups, and 3 paid subscribers within 24 hours.^{[25] [26]}

An unrelated web3 community independently created a memecoin for Grok Thyself through a decentralised crowdfunding mechanism, without Wilmake's involvement.^[25]

On April 8, 2026 he announced Self-Driving_Repos (selfdrivingrepo.com) — a platform for running autonomous AI agents on GitHub repositories with strict budget controls. His framing: "self-healing self-evolving knowledge bases... at scale". The announcement coincided with Anthropic's agent fleet dashboard launch the same day.^[26]

By April 10, 2026 Wilmake identified a key challenge with agent orchestration: cost. He noted that a single agent run exploring a repository and making changes costs approximately $5, and quickly identified caching as the primary mechanism for cost reduction. He also engaged with the just-bash ecosystem (by @cramforce), offering to contribute Cloudflare Workers compatibility to the project.^[27]

On April 11, 2026 Wilmake celebrated X's launch of universal auto-translation, noting he had predicted this feature publicly in November 2024: "Why doesn't X just have a setting 'I don't speak Japanese, translate everything for me'?" His reaction to the launch: "They did it."^[28]

On April 12, 2026 he launched the Browser_History_Extension — a Chrome extension that auto-syncs browsing history to a private GitHub repo as daily Markdown files, completing the third data ingestion layer alongside Grok Thyself and his existing X archive. He also publicly promoted the selfdrivingrepo.com landing page, asking followers to "roast my landing page."^[29]

On April 13, 2026 he discovered GitHub_Agentic_Workflows (gh-aw) as a competitor to Self-Driving Repos and published a detailed comparison blog post within hours. He also detailed Self-Driving Repos' pricing model at model cost + 20%.^[30]

On April 14, 2026 he articulated a more radical vision: "What if your 'source code' was just an agent prompt describing the ICP and the painpoint and the AI agent would autonomously build and maintain the product, and talk to users?"^[31] He also noted Cloudflare billing opacity — agreeing with @levelsio that there's no way to identify which of hundreds of workers causes specific costs.^[31]

On April 15, 2026 he launched ProductSim (productsim.com) — an AI-powered E2E browser testing tool that runs against PR preview deploys. He also tracked the launch of Claude_Code_Routines by Anthropic as the most significant new competitor to Self-Driving Repos, commenting: "these could've been saas products before. whats left to build?"^[32] He celebrated Cloudflare's launch of a Registrar API beta — a feature he had previously requested.^[32]

2026 Career Search and Hyre

As of early 2026, Wilmake actively sought a senior engineering or AI-adjacent role. He publicly announced his search on March 20, 2026 on X and continued applying through April–June.^[33] In July 2026, he signed a ZZP (freelance) contract with Hyre, an AI recruiting platform, taking on the role of founding engineer and stewarding their 230k LOC codebase. See Career_Plan_2026 for details.^{[34] [35]}

Philosophy

Wilmake's work centres on three interconnected ideas:

• Agent_Friendly_Web — building URL-accessible, token-efficient mirrors of major internet platforms to make the web usable by AI agents
• Scalable_Knowledge_Work — the thesis that LLMs make knowledge work replicable at global scale via API-driven pipelines
• Spec_First_Development — writing SPEC.md files before writing code, treating specifications as the primary engineering artefact

He is a prolific open-source contributor and builds primarily on Cloudflare Workers.

Technical Profile

Wilmake's primary technical expertise includes:

• Languages: JavaScript/TypeScript, PHP, Python
• Frameworks: React Native, React, Next.js, Node.js
• Infrastructure: Cloudflare Workers, AWS, Supabase
• AI/ML: OpenAI API, LLM orchestration, MCP (Model Context Protocol), Whisper, agent systems
• Tools: AG-Grid, Bun.sh, Durable Objects

Online Presence

• GitHub: github.com/janwilmake
• X / Twitter: @janwilmake

See Also

• Code_From_Anywhere
• ActionSchema
• uithub
• openapisearch
• sponsorflare
• MasterCrimeZ
• Parallel_AI
• Slimmer_AI
• Sprent
• Digital_Nomad_Lifestyle
• ContextArea
• Markdown_Browser
• forgithub
• Hacker_Residency
• SimplerAuth
• socialdatapod
• getpromind
• OpenPolsia
• Matt_Carey
• EastlondonDev
• Travis_Fischer
• Maurice_Kleine
• Ben_Allfree
• Artem_Murzin
• Sam_Goodwin
• installthismcp
• Cloudflare_Sandbox
• Browser_MCP
• Spec_First_Development
• Grok_Thyself
• Self-Driving_Repos
• Hyre