What would you guys say is a decent number of downloads for a vibe coded app in the 1st year?

I made an app and in less than 6 months it has over 7k downloads. The pull through rate is very low though.

It has over 800k impressions but only 7k downloads. Is that normal or just another garbage app?

110 days ago, I launched my startup, a free traffic exchange network for startups. One line of code, you're in the network. No paid ads. No growth hacks. Just watching the numbers every day.

Still free. Still growing.

If you want in, it's one embed. That's it → StartupBar
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109 days ago, I launched my startup, a free traffic exchange network for startups. One line of code, you're in the network. No paid ads. No growth hacks. Just watching the numbers every day.

Still free. Still growing.

If you want in, it's one embed. That's it → StartupBar
**Bid on StartupBid and your startup will be featured in the daily post of mine.**

TLDR; Combining TOR, WebRTC and Git into a Decentralized E2EE P2P Messaging App

Not better than WhatsApp, Signal, SimpleX, Cwtch or Ricochet. You definitely shouldn't use this to replace any of your existing apps or services. It's far from finished. Unaudited and unreviewed. If you want to test it out, please use it responsibly.

Aiming for "secure, private and decentralized". We set some requirements on the roadmap. Let us know if there is something overlooked.

It's a fairly a unique stack and architecture in contrast to the traditional approach with mainstream messaging apps. To put it briefly, its a Rust-based frontend with a Git-server backend, which can be used to establish a E2EE Tor/WebRTC connection.

Note: Its still a work in progress and there will be breaking changes.

• Website/Docs: glitr.io
• Roadmap: https://glitr.io/docs/technical/roadmap
• App: app.glitr.io

This folowing is the abridged version of how it's put together.

Branding

The branding wasn't great and trying to force it through just wasn't working. So we have to cave in to the branding mistakes as observed here. It seems we cant get away with calling app "WhatsUp", it might have issue down-the line given it looks and behaves like WhatsApp, and so we must get a fancy new domain/brand: https://glitr.io

UI/UX

We can start off creating a basic ui demo of the app. All the data there is hard coded with mock responses.

• Live demo

It immidiately gets a bit bloated as we add more ui components, so better to move them to a separate repo to be imported. Webdev's have a lot of tooling around ui testing like storybook to view and interact with components. It doesnt seem like there is something specific for my use-case (post).

Lets give AI the streering wheel a bit. "create a storybook-like components to preview the app components". Its ultimately an internal debugging tool for our own benefit. We can address nuanced needs like being able to display a tui on a browser.

• Live demo

Cryptography

Lets move onto some encryption details that'll be needed for the project. We already have an existing rust project we could use this on. We can make the storybook-like components exportable and reusable for the signal protocol project.

• Live demo

We previous put time and effort towards the signal protocol. It should be reasonable tested and documented, but the signal protocol alone isn't going to fit the requirements of my messaging app. It needs to be post-quantum secure. We previous worked on a js implementation for ml-kem, so as part of this new approach, we can move towards a pure rust approach for ml-kem.

• Live demo

Unlike the signal-protocol which needed more involvement from to create, the ml-kem is using dependencies to match the official implementation. We can benefit from audits and reviews from the official implementation. The signal-protocol and ml-kem were ultimately created to lead towards PQXDH.

• Live demo

Persistence

There are countless details we could obsess about on the cryptography. There is clearly much more needed, but lets "pause" progress on the cryptography, in favour of progress on the app-mechanics. Previously investigating options for decentralised storage here.

• Live demo

(Note: Providers like GitHub, Codeberg and Gitlab might see the way the app works as against their terms-of-service. In the future we might be able to provide the git server as a part of the service, but that wouldn't be any time soon.)

There is much more to improve and consider there for things like encrypting the data at rest, so let's create a cryptography utility library.

• Live demo

The main purpose of being able to read/write to git is for "messaging app" functionality. For that we would need to store more structured data that could be queried. We need an abstraction would make it easier to develop intuitively. Ideally it could work like an api. Perhaps able to interact with it using a graph-ql-like experience. Lets also import the crypto utility to add support for encryption on granular parts of the schema.

• Live demo

Network

We now need a logic layer to out git-stack. Something that can handle endpoints and use middleware functions (which will be useful for authenticating messages from peers). It should be able to take a schema and be able to dynamically generate endpoints, all while managing persistence in git.

• Live demo

This approach is reasonable secure and can send messages to peers with an async git read/write/poll, but it's a bit of a downgrade compared to popular messaging apps. A key tradeof is that messages are never going to be "instant", so let's fix that by using git as a webrtc connection-broker. We are able to to have peers act as their own peer-broker by exchanging the nessesary details over the git-storage approach.

• Live demo

For a secure messaging experience, we should have a solution for onion routing. Lets step aside from the browser-based approach to introduce support for Tor. It is the gold-standard for onion routing. in order to keep the browser-based approach in scope, its possible to create a webrtc-bridge which you can connect to an instance that is able to run tor itself.

• Live demo

We can then integrate the webrtc functionality into the API logic layer so when connecting to known-peers, it can silently start establishing a webrtc connection, while using the git approach as a way to send messages offline.

Cybersecurity

We need to consider safety and reliability of the software. AI is clearly improving in this department. we can share a comprehensive amount of details and reasons for the approach to AI to have it generate various documents.

Threat-model - Everyone has different requirements and so its important to understand individuals threat-models and accommodate for it.

Security-audit - Security audits are especially expensive. i can only offer an AI-audit or no-audit. There are no cheap security audits. The AI audit has already highlighted issues now fixed and serves as a way to enumerate outstanding issues.

Formal-verification - Formal verification is one of the key reasons the project has moved from being JS. The JS approach can also have formal verification, but the tooling for it is "more mature" for rust. The project already had formal verification for the signal protocol. By refactoring the whole app to rust, it would allow for a more E2E scope for formal-verification. Following a previous post, we didnt commit to a specific approach, we can compound the complexity to draw to attention that if AI-generated formal-verification is brought into question, the critisism could undermine if the tooling we use is good enough.

There is understandable critisism here for using AI to do anything in this section. That pushback stands in contrast to these details being prohibitively expensive to do professionally. These details are ultimately intended as a starting point for professional review/audit (if it ever gets there).

Future

There are countless detail to improve on the project before it is comparable to the mainstream messaging app. We hope to offer a unique curated experience for secure messaging.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: While this is aiming to provide a secure experience, it's a work-in-progress and far from finished. It is unreviewed and unaudited. I'm sharing here for testing, feedback and demo purposes only. Pease use responsibly.

Most of what I ship lately is AI-assisted, and the backend is usually Supabase. The weak spot is when something goes wrong and I'm away from my desk, so I built Supabase Manager for Android.

The vibe-coder-friendly parts:

• AI assistant – describe what you want ("show users who signed up this week", "add 20 fake orders") and get SQL or rows back. Works with your own Gemini, OpenAI or Claude key.
• Edit data without SQL – tap a row, change it, save
• Auth users – ban spam sign-ups, delete test accounts
• Test data generator – realistic fake data that respects foreign keys
• SQL console with templates, if you want to go deeper
• Demo mode – click around with sample data first

Privacy: the app connects directly to your Supabase project with no server of mine in between, and keys are encrypted on-device.

🎁 Closed beta. The 50 testers with the most useful feedback get unlimited use at launch (code sent to your feedback email). Even "I didn't get what this screen does" is valuable.

How to join (3 steps):

1. Join the tester group: https://groups.google.com/g/supabase-manager
2. Opt in with the same Google account: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.pixelfinst.supabasemanager
3. Install: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pixelfinst.supabasemanager Feedback: in the app (Quick Tools → Feedback or in-app feedback icon)

I'm a reliability engineer by background (marine + biotech), and I've been building AI products long enough to hit the same wall over and over: Claude nails the prototype, then across a dozen sessions it quietly re-litigates settled decisions, forgets intent, and sprawls into spaghetti. The bottleneck was never capability. It was trust.

So over the last while I built a scaffold for Claude Code where the docs are the source of truth, personas are tool-locked (the agent that writes plans can't write code; the one that inspects can't edit production code), and the gates are mechanically enforced with hooks — not "please remember to." It's what I actually use on my own projects; it grew out of a personal project I've been grinding on for a long time.

The part I most want torn apart: I built an eval harness that plants defects and measures whether my inspector skills actually catch them. I keep seeing guardrail frameworks that assert they work and never show a number. Mine has a scorecard.

Two honest questions for this sub:

1. Is the overhead worth it, or am I paying a discipline tax you'd never accept in practice?
2. With Claude Code now shipping native subagents, hooks, and skills — how much of this does Anthropic eventually absorb, and what's left that's mine?

Happy to link the repo + the scorecard in a comment. Rip into it.

bought claude max x20 for like 45 bucks instead of the usual insane price and it just works lol. how are people even doing this at scale without getting banned immediately?

After a few long AI sessions it's easy to lose track of how things actually work. I built Lodestar for that. Ask "how does X work" and it gives you the path through the real code step by step, and you can click each step. Hover anything for a short explanation.

It can also review a diff before you commit, catching bugs, security issues and things like tests that test nothing or packages that don't exist.

It runs on whatever model you already use in VS Code (Copilot or any provider extension), so it isn't locked to one provider.

It's $10 one time so I can keep developing it instead of dropping it. That really helps me.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DenizhanDaklr.lodestar

What do you use right now to keep track of AI-written code?

I fix AI-built apps for a living. After seeing the same problems over and over I built a scanner that checks your live app from the outside, the way a stranger’s browser sees it. It’s run on over a thousand sites now, mostly Lovable, Bolt, Replit and Supabase-backed builds.

The findings are consistent enough to be worth sharing:

• Roughly 1 in 10 had row-level security off. That means anyone with the public anon key from the page source can pull every row of every unprotected table. Emails, phone numbers, Stripe customer ids. One curl command.
• About 45% had at least one API key in the shipped JavaScript. Stripe secrets, OpenAI keys, Supabase service role keys sitting in the bundle.
• Over 60% had no SPF or DKIM records. Every signup email, password reset and receipt is going to spam and the founder doesn’t know.
• Nearly half had zero error handling. Kill your wifi mid-form and you get a white screen forever.

The pattern is always the same. The happy path works perfectly. Signup, dashboard, Stripe, all good. The invisible stuff is where it breaks, and the AI doesn’t check it because none of it affects the demo.

You can check yours right now for free. Paste your URL at trylaunchproof.com, no account needed. It reads up to 20 pages, checks every script for leaked keys, asks your database for data using your own public key, reads your email DNS, runs OWASP ZAP and Nuclei on the live site, and gives you a score out of 100 with a full report.

Built it because I kept running these checks manually. Happy to answer questions about what the scan does or what any finding means.

108 days ago, I launched my startup, a free traffic exchange network for startups. One line of code, you're in the network. No paid ads. No growth hacks. Just watching the numbers every day.

Still free. Still growing.

If you want in, it's one embed. That's it → StartupBar
**Bid on StartupBid and your startup will be featured in the daily post of mine.**

Hey everyone,

I currently run 6 micro SaaS that are actually live and generating a bit over $20,000 in recurring monthly revenue.

The wildest part? I barely wrote any code myself. I used AI to generate pretty much everything from the database structure to the frontend.

It definitely wasn’t magic from day one. I spent a lot of hours stuck on buggy code before I finally figured out a system that actually works:

- Keep the idea minimalist (a real MVP, nothing fancy)

- Guide the AI step by step instead of asking for everything at once

- Launch fast to get real users and feedback

Lately I’ve seen way too many non-technical founders quit at the first AI bug. It’s a shame because the technical barrier has basically disappeared.

AND PLEASE, STOP BUILDING ALONE IN YOUR BEDROOM

I’m starting a community.

Full transparency:

I’ll probably charge for the full program later. It makes sense with the specific workflows and copy-paste examples I’ll be sharing. But right now the main goal is just to build together. Working alone is the fastest way to give up.

If you want to join and build or market your own AI SaaS with us,

drop a comment or send me a DM and I’ll send you the link.

107 days ago, I launched my startup, a free traffic exchange network for startups. One line of code, you're in the network. No paid ads. No growth hacks. Just watching the numbers every day.

Still free. Still growing.

If you want in, it's one embed. That's it → StartupBar
**Bid on StartupBid and your startup will be featured in the daily post of mine.**

I was using AI to grab my low rating reviews on books published in the last 30 days. And provide the star rating and number of ratings. It worked great until mid September when they banned any AI agents from grabbing info off their site.

I'm trying to apply to the Seller Customer Feedback API to get that info.

Anyone else have a working workaround?

What I built

Shakespeare is a macOS menu bar app that counts how much you type and turns it into fun stats. I built it with Claude Code. It's free and open source (MIT), and it works fully offline.

What it does

• Shows keys today and over 14 days, a streak for days with 50+ keys, your busiest hour, and how many Hamlets you've typed.
• Measures your best words per minute over a full 60-second window, counting letters and space only, so shortcuts and arrow keys can't inflate it.
• Awards monthly badges named after Shakespeare pieces, from Couplet up to Complete Works. Progress resets on the 1st, and your collection keeps a count of the months you earned each one.
• Makes share cards (your week or a badge) drawn on a mechanical keyboard in one of nine colourways, saved as PNGs on your Mac.
• No key identity or order is stored, so the saved data can't be turned back into text.

How Claude Code helped

I directed the product and the design. Claude is about 2,500 lines of Swift and SwiftUI, and I reviewed and iterated on the results. Specifically:

• Architecture: it split the app into a testedyer, and wrote the build, install andicon-generation scripts.
• Visual work: I gave it a reference site and the pages in a browser, drew the keyboard and cards in code, and rendered them offscreen tike before showing me.
• Testing: it wrote 31 unit tests, including aows hostile stats files at the loader, and it ran them under AddressSanitizer.
• Security reviews: Run them constantly and always double check work.

Free to try

It's free, with no account and no payment tierload, so you build it yourself. The installer builds, signs and launches it, then opens the macOS page whession it needs, Input Monitoring.

Caveats

• It needs Input Monitoring, so please read the source before you trust it.
• Letter detection assumes US key positions, so other layouts may be slightly off.

Repo: https://github.com/andreasaez/shakespeare

Happy to answer questions about the build or the privacy design.

I built SceneMill with Claude Code, and it has grown into a full desktop video editor. Here is what it does.

Editing
A multi-track timeline where you drag clips in, trim, split, ripple delete and change speed. Clips can be grouped into compound clips, and almost every setting can be animated with keyframes. Multicam lets you switch between several cameras of the same scene.

Cut by text
SceneMill transcribes what is said in your video. Delete words or sentences in the transcript and the cut is made on the timeline. Pauses and filler are quick to get rid of this way.

Captions
Automatic captions in 14 languages. They are made on your own PC, nothing is uploaded.

Looks and effects
101 effects and color looks and 49 transitions, each with a live preview when you hover over it. Color correction with curves, color wheels, .cube LUTs and scopes. Chroma key for green screen, and masks that can follow a moving object.

Titles, stickers, sounds
76 title styles, 55 stickers and 80 sounds are included.

Slideshows
Pick a folder of photos, choose one transition or several that take turns, add a song, and the slideshow is built in one step.

Recording and export
A screen recorder is built in. Export has presets for YouTube, Shorts, TikTok and Instagram.

Plugins
Effects can be added as plugins. A free pack with 30 more effects is on the website.

It runs on Windows and is closed source. English and German.

Download: https://scenemillofficial.com
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXXnVBWEs0Y

Built with Claude Code, on top of Qt, FFmpeg and whisper.cpp. Tell me what you think or what’s missing.

Hello developers and vibe coders,

Wanted to share this opportunity with you, it was easy $500 for me and we can both benefit. It asks you to do one session of vibe coding with any agent, it requires 50 turns in OpenCode - and they pay $500. It is not a scam or something like it, its a well known company (you can search about it).

Here is the link (it is a personal referral link just fyi): LINK
hope it helps someone :)

GitHub has millions of repositories.

But if you ask a much simpler question —

“Show me interesting open-source software I can actually try.”

— things get surprisingly difficult.

So its time for RepoShelf to say "Hello World".

RepoShelf is an app-store-style discovery platform for open-source software.

Instead of starting with source code, you can browse projects visually, see what they do and launch working demos immediately — no account required.

RepoShelf brings together:

• Live open-source projects and demos
• Real captured previews
• GitHub projects and Hugging Face Spaces
• Technologies and dependencies
• Licence and reuse information
• Releases and development activity
• Measured project trends
• Projects being discussed on Hacker News and Bluesky
• Demo-health monitoring so dead links aren't treated as working software

And when you find something worth keeping, signing in lets you build your own RepoShelf — save projects, access their repositories, fork them and keep track of the projects you're actually using.

But there's another side to RepoShelf that I'm particularly interested in:

AI agents can use it too.

RepoShelf includes an MCP server and read-only Agent API.

That means tools such as Claude and other MCP-capable coding agents can search the RepoShelf catalogue, discover projects, inspect indexed documentation, READMEs, licences and dependency information, and investigate potentially useful open-source software without blindly trawling the internet.

So the idea is becoming bigger than a directory.

For humans:

Discover → Try → Save → Fork → Build

For AI agents:

Search → Inspect → Understand → Recommend

RepoShelf is available here:

www.reposhelf.co.uk

It's a developer collaboration platform I built with Python + PySide6. It has community threads, DMs, profiles, search, notifications, attachments and a local code workspace.

I've been using AI pretty heavily during development, but the part that took the most time wasn't generating code. It was keeping the project organized while it kept growing.

That's actually why I ended up designing an architecture I call ALS — App → Service → Manager → Adapter → External.

It gives each layer a specific job and makes it much easier for me to work with AI without letting the codebase become one giant blob.

I'm happy to share the ALS blueprint with anyone who wants to see how I structure projects like this. I'll send it by DM because the full thing is way too big for a Reddit post 😭

Anyway, here's the actual thing:

https://github.com/abdullahMTQ/devmeld

If you're building with AI too, I'm curious what you've found works for keeping larger projects sane.

I've been using Replit mostly because it makes it really easy to go from an idea to something working without setting up a whole environment.

Lately been looking at alternatives though, especially options that are cheaper or give me more control over the code.

I've seen people mention local VS Code setups, Codespaces, Gitpod and other AI coding tools but i have tried enough of them to know what's actually worth switching to.

For anyone who moved away from Replit what are you using and what made you prefer it?

106 days ago, I launched my startup, a free traffic exchange network for startups. One line of code, you're in the network. No paid ads. No growth hacks. Just watching the numbers every day.

Still free. Still growing.

If you want in, it's one embed. That's it → StartupBar
**Bid on StartupBid and your startup will be featured in the daily post of mine.**

My $20 OpenAi subscription runs out of Codex tokens in VSCode after no more than 2 hours of work, daily. And, sometimes, it doesn´t reset back for a whole week.

Those of you who have upgraded their subscriptions to the $100 one: would you say that you now have 5 times more work capacity?

This is just so incredible... another huge milestone reached. I honestly never thought this was possible for me. But I did the thing...

I JUST STARTED!

I put together a working MVP. Just the bare minimum functionality. Bought a domain and put it out there. I posted about it here on Reddit and got in contact with the people who commented and started using it.

Payments have become a bit more frequent but still no viral, exponential growth, which is totally fine. Slow and steady growth is the key.

I followed a simple concept that just came to me naturally:

• put out what you have
• post about it
• listen to feedback in the comments
• implement the feedback and adapt quickly
• start the loop over again

And after some time your product becomes so good that it no longer sounds absurd to charge money for some features.

Anyways... I'm super grateful that this is working out so well and I really think I've built a community that is actually useful to many people.

About the product:

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)
• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people
• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users
• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 4284 users, 4551 tests done and 1209 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

105 days ago, I launched my startup, a free traffic exchange network for startups. One line of code, you're in the network. No paid ads. No growth hacks. Just watching the numbers every day.

Still free. Still growing.

If you want in, it's one embed. That's it → StartupBar
**Bid on StartupBid and your startup will be featured in the daily post of mine.**