Building something for a longer time has a strange rhythm. In the beginning, almost everything feels like progress. You have a first version, a new feature to show or somebody commenting on your work for the first time. Even the problems are exciting because they are new problems. Motivation is usually not something you need to think about yet. There is enough movement around the project to carry you.
This happened to us after releasing Cate. For some time, the GitHub stars grew pretty fast. We checked the graph much more often than we should and read every issue that came in. People shared the repository, asked questions and gave us the feeling that the project was going somewhere. Of course this made working on it easier. Every new star was a small confirmation that the idea was maybe not only interesting to us.
Then the growth slowed down a lot. We knew this would happen at some point because no launch continues forever. People find a project, look at it, maybe try it and then move on. Still, we did not expect how much the slower growth would affect our own motivation. The work stayed the same, but the small reward we got from GitHub every day was suddenly mostly gone.
This is when we started asking ourselves more uncomfortable questions. Maybe people liked the idea but did not really want to use it. Maybe Cate already had its moment. Maybe we should spend our time on something new, where everything feels possible again and the first progress comes quickly. We could tell ourselves that GitHub stars are only a vanity metric, but this would be dishonest. When you work on something for months, outside attention matters. It does not need to be the main reason, but it helps.
The strange part is that Cate is a much better project now than when the stars were growing faster. A lot of the work just became difficult to show. At the beginning, we could post a GIF and people understood the idea in a few seconds. Now we sometimes spend days fixing something. When the fix is done, nothing impressive happens.
We had to change what we consider progress. "Make the stars grow again" is not a useful task because there is no clear action behind it. Fixing one problem that keeps coming back is a task. Finishing the next release is a task. Looking at the changelog also helps because it shows the difference between the project now and one month ago. The star graph can be flat during the same month, and these two things can easily confuse your brain if you only look at one of them.
The main reason we continue is that we still have the problem that made us start Cate. We use coding agents ourselves, the workflow still gets messy and we still want a better way to manage it. As long as we use the project and keep noticing things we want to improve, there is a reason to continue.
There may be a point where stopping is the correct decision. If we no longer use Cate ourselves, nobody else uses it or we stop believing in the problem, then we should take that seriously. Slower star growth alone is not enough. It only tells us that the launch attention is over, which is very different from the project being over.