The alpha was out. But I wasn't satisfied with the architecture. The original Buddy had a fundamental fragility: tightly coupled to Claude Code. Every version upgrade could wipe it. And if you weren't running Claude Code specifically, you were excluded entirely. I didn't want to rebuild the same fragility. The core architectural decision was simple to state: Buddy must work with any CLI. Not just Claude Code. Whether you're running Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot CLI, or something that doesn't exist yet — the feature should be available to you. That constraint pointed directly to MCP — the Model Context Protocol. By implementing Buddy as an MCP server, we could decouple the personality layer from any specific CLI's version cycle and make it compatible with any harness that supports the protocol. 🏗️ Architecture Decision This is where reality checked us. Not all CLIs are built the same. Claude Code has hooks. GitHub Copilot has hooks. Codex CLI has hooks. Cursor has hooks. But beyond those, support gets sparse fast. And the ability to customize the status line — that small but satisfying UI touch that shows Buddy's mood and level — is something only Claude Code cleanly exposes right now. For Codex, we couldn't do it through normal means; it required patching the binary on an experimental branch, which directly violated our first principle of no hard harness dependency. That's an honest limitation we're sitting with as the ecosystem catches up. The second major design decision: do we pass the full diff to the model, or a summary? Full diff means richer, more specific feedback. But our users are running Buddy on top of their own API subscriptions. They're paying for every token. I went with the summary approach — and when we launched on Friday and someone immediately posted on Reddit asking exactly how much overhead this adds per interaction, I knew we'd made the right call. 💡 Lesson Learned We shipped with three interaction modes: Mode What it does Skill Coach Code review feedback delivered in character In-Character Personality only, no review Hybrid (default) Both — full experience out of the box Default is hybrid. Give users the full experience, let them dial back if needed. For anyone curious how I actually built this, here's the process I follow: Regular features → plan mode in Claude Code Complex features → have Codex review the plan first Complex implementations → have Codex review after building Always → /simplify before committing Big strategic decisions → gstack /office-hours for a long design conversation before touching code Stack used: Claude Code (plan mode + implementation) MCP (Model Context Protocol) One-line npm install Summary-based code review (not full diff) Codex for complex plan review gstack /office-hours for architecture decisions Next up → By Friday we had stars, a Reddit thread, and organic Google pickup. But a comparison table in the README almost caused a community problem — and what fixing it taught me about open source. This is part 2 of the "Shipping Buddy Into the Wild" series about how we shipped https://github.com/fiorastudio/buddy v1 release in one week.