Crafter Station started as a WhatsApp group of people in Peru who wanted to build things. Today we are more than a thousand builders across LATAM, with 219 public repositories at github.com/crafter-station. Almost everything we make can be read, installed, and forked.
We never decided this in a meeting. Building in the open paid off from the first repo, so we kept doing it. This post explains why.
Your public code is your resume#
When you have a repo people use, nobody asks where you went to school. A degree shows you passed courses. A repo with issues, pull requests, and users shows you can ship.
For a builder in Peru, that matters a lot. Remote employers, research programs, and funds will not meet you in person, but they can read your GitHub.
Open work travels further than you plan#
petdex is a gallery of animated pets for coding agents like Codex and Claude Code. It has more than 4,300 stars. elements, our full-stack shadcn/ui blocks, is past 550. text0 is past 450.
None of them had a campaign behind it. Someone found it, installed it, and showed it to someone else. A closed project depends on you to sell it. An open one, if it is good, finds its own way.
Agents only recommend what they can read#
More people now find tools by asking a model. That model can only recommend what it can read. That is why this site has an llms.txt, every post also exists as markdown, and we write READMEs so an agent can tell what each repo does and how to use it.
To an agent, closed code does not exist.
You learn faster in public#
With a public repo, anyone can open an issue to tell you something is wrong. It stings at first. It is also the fastest way to get better: an issue from a stranger teaches you more than another review from the same team.
Writing and publishing the work also forces us to understand it. If we cannot explain it in a README, we are not done yet.
What it does not mean#
Open source does not mean nothing is ever paid or that there are no products. Some Crafter projects will have a paid version, and that is fine. What it does mean is that the work is visible: the code, the decisions, and the mistakes.
How to join#
- Browse the repos at github.com/crafter-station and pick one you already use.
- Open an issue or a pull request. Contributors get access per repo.
- Join the community on Discord and tell us what you are building.
If you build from Peru or anywhere in LATAM, this is your place.