Coderwall wasn't built on Assembly, it was owned by one of the Assembly co-founders and they brought it onto the platform, but little work happened to it once it was on the platform.

    It was a good system, really, and resulted in some 
    pretty neat projects. That said, I'm not surprised 
    to see it being shuttered. A while back they pivoted 
    most of their tools [...]

Their platform was very good. The pivot only happened quite recently, it seemed like a last ditch attempt to build a product that could generate interest rather than a mistake that caused the death of Assembly.

My take is that Assembly (the original platform) failed because for a project (being developed on the platform) to succeed it needs passionate people heavily invested in a vision for the project: the majority of projects created on Assembly didn't have this, they had people who thought "this is cool" and were willing to contribute an hour or 2, but they lacked passionate leaders. 100 people who think "this is cool" aren't worth 1 that thinks "this is the future, I'm putting everything I have into this". Most projects on Assembly effectively limped from contributor to contributor.

Buckets was a good example of a project being built on Assembly that had the chance to succeed because there was a lead developer who was driving it forward, he was very passionate, had a vision and invested a lot of his time into it, and others were providing value even if they just dedicated an hour or so.

Assembly (the company) probably would have had a better chance of succeeding if they had built the platform and then had their employees focused on leading projects, being the passionate leaders projects need and giving the community a few years to grow to the point where it was self sustaining. Firesize is a good example of what was possible, but unfortunately that was only one of a few projects that had passionate people involved.

I really liked Assembly and it's a shame it didn't work out. I think the idea has a chance one day but it needs time to grow organically, I don't think it can work as a VC backed company that is expected to grow however many percent month on month...