Refraction has been acquired by Twistag

Today, Refraction was acquired by Twistag, a design and software agency in Lisbon.

Refraction started in January as a single text box. You picked a language, pasted in some code and it refactored it using the OpenAI API, streaming the result back through Vercel Edge Functions. The first version took less than two days to build.

It became my most successful and fastest-growing product. Six months later it has 13K users, who’ve run 60K+ generations and generated over 2.5M lines of code. People are using it at companies like Amazon, Google, Qantas and Uber.

I got lucky in the first month when @spacecoding featured it in a reel that got more than 20K views and sent a lot of traffic my way. I tried some outbound marketing too, with a feature in Ben’s Bites, some Product Hunt ads and plenty of tweeting. But what worked best was talking to customers and building what they asked for.

So for the next few months, I focused on the product. The single text box became a set of tools that write unit tests, documentation, types, regular expressions, CSP headers and Mermaid diagrams in 60+ languages and frameworks. It now runs in VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, Sublime Text, Visual Studio and the terminal through extensions. Teams get their own plans and usage analytics, and in May I launched Autoreview, a GitHub app that writes descriptions and reviews for pull requests.

I didn’t set out to sell Refraction. I’d reached out to the customers spending the most on it, hoping to build the roadmap around what they needed, and somewhere in those conversations Twistag and I got talking about an acquisition. It came together pretty naturally from there.

Twistag will keep building Refraction from here, and I’m keen to see where they take it.