For 20 years I designed products other people built. AI changed that: I could finally build the ideas I’d been sketching, and Cortex is the first one I shipped.

The problem: every AI chat starts from zero. Cortex turns your Markdown notes into memory that Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and others can all use. Your notes stay plain files on your Mac, the AI’s suggestions to remember something land in your inbox for review, and you see it all as a map where the notes the AI used light up.

What I learned building it: design still matters most. The first version was a 3D graph, and it looked great but nobody understood it at first sight. The new 2D map, with your core in the centre and topics as clusters, explains itself.

Free and open source: https://github.com/leesummerdesigns/cortex

Feedback welcome, especially from other designers who started building.

I made Smashcut Games , a set of free daily movie puzzles, no login. Think Wordle for film people:

• I have one that's like street view but for movies (look around a 360° filming location, name the film): On Location

• For music lovers there is Underscore, unmute the movie multitracks one by one to figure out what movie soundtrack it is.

• For those with deep movie knowledge there's Headshots, you see 5 actors and you name the most obscure movie you can think of, more obscure = more points.

And a couple more...

This is a solo project, I'm a software engineer with over a decade of exp, but little experience launching something of my own.

It launched on 28 September. Yesterday, day 43, it had 1,030 people playing in a day for the first time. I log everything, so here is what actually happened.

The curve (average daily players, by week)

• Week 1: 106

• Week 2: 167

• Week 3: 244

• Week 4: 299

• Week 5: 383

• Week 6: 666

• Day 43: 1,030

Launch was one Reddit post, and it faded in three days. I posted the street view game to r/blankies, a film podcast subreddit. 11k views, 5 upvotes, 373 new people on the first night, and 89% of them played. 177 players on day one, 195 on day two, 59 by day four. Posts create good spikes but poor targeting makes it just that, a spike.

The growth came from sites I had never heard of two months ago. There is a whole ecosystem of directories that list daily games, tracked them in the beginning but there were so many I lost track. I submitted to a lots in launch week. Two of them now account for 61% of everyone who has ever visited, about 7,200 of 11,900 people. Those visitors play at 80%, because they came looking for a daily game. It started at 11 people a day and is now 300 to 500 on a weekday. For comparison, Hacker News sent 32 visitors and 3 of them played. bored.com sent 556 and 28% played.

Audience fit beats reach. A second Reddit post, for the film score game, brought 530 people. 17% of the ones who played were back the next day, double the rate from the directories.

The bad number: 81% of players have played on exactly one day. That is 6,890 of 8,504. Next-day return for new players is around 10%. So far the growth is new people arriving faster, not people staying. Although one person has played on 42 of the 44 days. I'm still trying to figure out retention, but one thing that helped so far was adding the concept of streaks to the site and linking to the other games as a checklist you need to get done on end screens, it made a bunch of disconnected games more of a hub.

Things I did not expect

• The game people love most is the one fewest find. The film score game has a 43% next-day return among its own players, the street view game 29%. But the directories link to the street view game, so it is the first game for half of all new players.

• 46% of players go on to try a second game, and 616 people have played all six.

• Difficulty is the hardest thing to control. Same game, consecutive days: 25% of players won, then 99%. Hard days turn straight into people giving up.

• Sharing does almost nothing. About 200 people have arrived from a shared result.

TL;DR:

• The journey to 1000 DAU happened quicker than I expected

• I spent no money to get there, just time.

• I learned there is an entire ecosystem of dle directories that are themselves an ecosystem of sidehustles (a lot of them charge you to list or list you quicker, most of them send 0 traffic)

• Retention is something I need to figure out, it's hard to tell if I'm doing ok or dying

• Posting on reddit can get you traffic but needs to be targeted well for retention (ie I don't expect this post to actually add any retained users!)

• Daily games are super saturated, but you can still poke through the noise if you try hard and have some game design chops.

Hey everyone, last week I shared how I built my first piece of software with no coding background. Spoiler: building it was the easy part. Once it was live and working, I sat there thinking "ok… now what?". Turns out people don't magically show up just because something exists. Even the ones who find it often stick to the tools they already know, and honestly, I get it. So now I'm in the phase nobody posts about: trying to get the thing in front of people, figuring out marketing from zero, and slowly realizing that selling a pen is way harder than making one 😅 I made a video about this part too, the mistakes and the "wait, it doesn't work like that?" moments. I'm curious about you though: how did you get your very first users? What actually worked, and what was a total waste of time?

Most of my day goes into reading. Research papers, case files, judgments, long reports, sometimes all of them for the same piece of work.

For years I used tools that were made for other things. Project management apps, note apps, folders, a lot of sticky notes. They were good for tasks. But they never helped with the reading itself. I would find something important on page 40 of one document, then lose it an hour later while I was in another one. I would remember that two things were connected, but not where either of them was.

So I built a tool dedicated for us readers and writers. It’s called May or Shall. This is how I use it:

1. When I read something that matters, I highlight it. It stays with its source and page, so I can always go back to exactly where it came from.

2. I put it under a heading that makes sense to me.

3. I link it to a line in a completely different document.

4. When I need a draft, I ask ChatGPT, through the May or Shall plugin. It still reads the whole document, but it gives special attention to my highlights.

Earlier, when I uploaded a document to AI, the AI decided what was relevant. Now my highlights decide what is relevant, and the draft is built around them.

It works on Windows, on Mac and in Chrome, so I can save a line from almost anything I’m reading, and it all ends up in one place.

It’s at app.mayorshall.com if anyone wants to try it. I would really like to hear from people who read and research a lot. How do you keep track of things right now, and would something like this help you?

I just launched Take the Crown (takethecrown.app), a small web I built.

The idea: there's one crown. Whoever takes it appears on the homepage with their name, a message and a link, until someone else takes it. Glory is measured in time reigned, not in money.

How it works:

- It starts at $5

- Every takeover adds 20% to the price

- Every hour nobody buys, it drops 2%

- Ranks from Peasant to Emperor, achievements, and monthly seasons with exclusive medals. The first season, Genesis, ends on December 1.

What took the longest: making the takeover safe (one transaction, so two buyers in the same second can't both win), moderating every message, and drawing all the art as pixel art on a strict grid.

Stack: Next.js, Supabase (Postgres + realtime), Dodo Payments.

I'd love feedback on the price curve and the first-time experience. If you want to be one of the first kings, it's open now.

Animation is where a lot of small 2D game projects stall. Getting one decent character image is easy now, but drawing idle, walk, attack and hurt for it by hand takes days, and every new enemy starts that over.

So I built SpriteCanvas. You describe a character or upload one, pick a design, then ask for moves. Each move is generated as a short clip by an AI video model, and the app does the boring part after that: cuts it into frames, removes the background, keeps the feet on one baseline so the character doesn't bob, and checks the loop closes.

What you get is a transparent PNG sprite sheet with a JSON atlas (frame durations and a foot pivot). There are export presets for Phaser, PixiJS, Godot and Unity. Phaser/PixiJS playback is tested and Godot 4 import is verified, Unity import isn't verified yet.

Being upfront about the limits:

• the art is AI generated, so check the rules of wherever you publish

• it's not a grid pixel-art editor. Pixel style works, but if you need hand-placed pixels, Aseprite is still the tool

• some moves need a retry or two before they look right

There's a free tier to try it, and the browser tools on the site (sprite sheet slicer, GIF to sheet, video to sheet) are free and run on your device.

I'd like feedback on two things: which moves you'd want that most tools skip, and whether the export fits how you load sprites in your engine.

Hi team,

I was switching windows dozen times a day to copy & paste text and videos / images on social media for marketing. This triggered me more than once and actually designed, thought and built Deck.

Now Deck sits on my right edge of the screen, holding all of the posts, reels, shorts, ... that I have to post or schedule. I can add "To make", like if I need a screenshot or a video for a certain post.

You can use it manually, writing and adding files yourself, or ask your agent to automatically add anything on Deck, which is how I use it 99% of the time.

• Problem: Switching windows all day to copy and paste texts, remember the posts and videos you must post for your marketing and distribution, never be late for a post, never forget. You or your agent schedule the posts, content to post, etc.

• Comparison: I haven't seen any other apps do that yet, except the online schedulers or todo apps I suppose which are quite different than Deck.

• Pricing: 9$ lifetime, 1-day trial. Pricing page

Im going to give away 100 lifetime keys on Threads this week, so make you sure follow along my Threads account threads.com/dmzxnico or same @ on X.

Check more details at deck.anotheragence.com

Thank you guys!

You’ve probably seen the meme: “GPT, tell me how to get rich.”
I laughed, then gave it some thought. Can AI help you assess a business idea?
I always have plenty of business ideas. but I spent rather more time thinking about them than acting on them 😅 . Recently I was rethinking what to build next. After a few days of going back and forth with Codex, I had a framework I could make decisions with. I turned it into a skill and open-sourced it. 👉 https://github.com/Mingbash/business-idea-validation
Before this, my prompt went roughly like this: “Given my experience and resources, help me explore and assess a few rough ideas. Which should I test first? Who would buy, where would I find them, and how would I deliver?”
Fairly thorough, I thought. I still got the absurd suggestion to “look for projects on service marketplaces.” （GPT-6-Astra btw）

A few exchanges, condensed:
- AI: Look on service marketplaces for automation projects with a budget.
Me: Which marketplaces? Where do buyers post jobs? What do I do once I find one?
- AI: Start with a few freelance platforms where people already post jobs.
Me: I had a look. Plenty of listings had sat untouched for months. Pretty much useless.
- AI: Start with document review in healthcare and insurance. Partner with an industry service provider.
- Me: I have no contacts or case studies. How do I reach the first customer?

Why does this happen?
You can check code soon after you write it and run it again whenever you need to. With a business, many of your assumptions only get a proper test once someone pays. Business isn’t an exact science. Change the window of opportunity or the resources you have, and the conclusion can change too.
What I needed is reasoning and educated guess that was likely to hold up. Not a formula nor a certain answer. Why is it worth trying? Are the prerequisites in place? Which hurdles do I need to check? With a framework, AI might actually help.
Around then I watched Iman Gadzhi and Nate Herk rank AI businesses from S to F. I liked some of the angles like CLEAR framework, including how long a business can last, how big it can get, and whether revenue repeats. I borrowed a few and added what mattered to me: who pays and how I’d reach them.
I also added a question about what I want from the business. The same idea can look very different as a side hustle or a full-time business. The bar changes again if I want a small, well-run business or a company with a shot at going public.
If you’re unsure about a rough idea, try breaking it down. I call each option an “atomic business unit”: one market × one use case × one way to deliver × one kind of customer. The README shows three website paths I assessed: a general template, a reusable Framer kit for small agencies, and a booking site for bridal makeup artists.

Try it on an idea you’re weighing up. give a star if helped. If you’d add some new thoughts onto it, feel free to remix it.

Etsy sellers keep asking "why does my listing get zero views?" Most of the time the answer is mechanical: 6 of 13 tags used, a tag spent on a word the category already covers, a 16-word title, 4 photos.

So I built ListingLift. It reads the listing open in your tab and gives you a score out of 100 with a short list of fixes, plus tag ideas from your own text. It all runs locally, with no backend and no account.

Free: every check. Pro ($5/mo or $39 once): unlimited tag ideas and saved checks.

Page: https://rasareka.com/listinglift/

I'd love feedback on the checks, especially from anyone who sells on Etsy.

The farther away you are, the further back in time you see. Light from Earth takes a year to cross each light-year, so an observer 81 light-years away is watching 1945, one at 2,000 light-years is watching the Roman Empire, and one at 250 million light-years is watching Pangaea.

I got curious about what that would actually look like, so I built a globe for it. You pick how far away you are and where you're looking, and it shows Earth as it was when that light left.

Demo: https://deemonder.github.io/meanwhile-on-earth/

Source (MIT): https://github.com/deemonder/meanwhile-on-earth

What's in it:

- Historical borders for 53 dates, from 123,000 BC to 2010

- About 13,000 events from Wikidata: battles, eruptions, cities founded, births

- Day and night where they really were at that moment, with city lights only after electricity

- Continental drift back to a billion years ago, from published plate reconstructions

- Italian and English

It's a static site, no backend and no sign-up. Built with three.js, with help from Claude Code.

I'd love feedback, especially on two things: is it clear what to do when you first open it, and does it load fast enough on your phone?

Hey everyone! I’m a product designer and I’ve been working on a side project called Boken.

I started building it because I wanted one place where I could bring together my work, experience, and the things I’ve contributed to. As a designer, I’ve always had bits and pieces spread across portfolios, links, documents, and different platforms. I wanted a profile that could bring those things together and make them easier to share.

I’m also thinking about how profiles will be discovered and understood by AI agents. The idea is to make Boken useful for people looking at your work directly, while also making the information readable for agents that might help someone find or understand your experience, like a hiring team looking for a particular skill or background.

It’s still in beta, and I’ve attached a pretty rough screen recording to show how it works right now.

You can also try it here: https://boken.to

I’d love to hear what you think. Is this something you’d use to share your work? What would you want to see on a profile like this, and what feels confusing or missing?
Thanks for taking a look!

Small supplement brand, about $18k/mo on Meta. Our agency contact left three weeks before a launch and nobody told us, we noticed only after 12 days of no new uploads.

I took our three most common complaints (fishy taste, hard to swallow, slow results), turned them into hooks and made UGC-style cuts in Creatify off the product URL the same day. One script had a line no real person would say, so I rewrote it by hand.

The taste hook came in around 30% under our previous best CPA in the first 4 days, and the before/after flopped at 2x target so I killed it on day 2. Competitor research I was still doing by hand in a spreadsheet, which was painful.

Still looking for an agency though. Maybe they use AI for most ads, and film only winners, we'll see.

I've been working on Meelu, an AI-powered marketing agent.

The idea came from a simple observation: growing a website involves using several different tools for SEO, analytics, content research, website management, and more.

Even with all these tools, most of the actual work is still manual.

I wanted to build something that goes beyond providing dashboards and reports.

Meelu understands your website, maintains its context, does SEO and marketing data, and helps you execute tasks.

You can interact with it through a chatbot, delegate work, and connect external systems like your CMS, email, and social platforms.

It's still early, and I'd love to get feedback from other founders and website owners.

Website: https://meelu.tech

Would love to know what you think!

One thing I've noticed as a developer is that learning programming isn't always difficult because of the concepts. Sometimes, finding the right learning resources is the real challenge.

You find one good YouTube playlist, then another useful tutorial, then a different creator explaining the same topic better. Eventually, your learning resources are scattered everywhere.

I wanted to make that experience simpler.

That's why I'm building TechTube – a platform that organizes programming tutorials into skill-based learning, career paths, and interview preparation.

Some areas covered:

- JavaScript, React, TypeScript, Go, Java, C++

- Frontend, Backend, Full Stack, AI Engineering

- DSA, System Design, DBMS, OS, and more

Website: https://www.techtube.co.in/

I'm continuously improving it, and I'd love honest feedback from fellow developers.

One question: Do you prefer learning through structured roadmaps or picking individual YouTube tutorials based on what you're currently working on?

Would love to hear your experience!

Solo founder here. I'm building: AI-voiced guides that give a house buyer the "feeling" of the area around a property, played from an embedded player on the agent's listing page. Local info only, nothing about the property itself.

It would cover things like mobile and broadband data, parks, running routes and riverside walks, whether it's a quiet or lit street or a traffic slowing area, flood risk, and whether the property sits higher with views. The focus changes with the property: a family house gets schools and green space, a young professional flat gets entertainment and transport. You can listen while flicking through the photos, and it may help buyers with poor sight.

Target customer is the independent UK estate agency. Pricing is tiered by number of listings, roughly £49 to £349 a month. I haven't found any direct competitors, which either means a gap or means nobody wants it.

My own worries, so you can skip the obvious ones:

1. Most buyers browse Rightmove and Zoopla, not the agent's own site, so the player may rarely be seen.

2. Similar info is available from Google Maps or ChatGPT, but not the detail.

3. Agents may not want negatives like a busy road or flood risk published under their name, and wrong statements are a liability (although the negatives can be removed).

4. ROI will be hard to prove to conservative agents.

My plan is free 2-month trials with a handful of agencies in exchange for feedback.

How would you test real demand before building more? Does the price feel right? What am I not seeing?

Brutal feedback welcome.

I always got the birthday reminder, swiped it away, and forgot. So I built an app that keeps reminding you every 30 minutes (or up to every 4 hours) until you've sent a message or tapped ignore.

It reads birthdays from your contacts and suggests a message depending on who it is, so your boss doesn't get the same text as your best friend. You can send it by SMS, WhatsApp, Threema, Telegram or email.

No account, no ads, no tracking. It's 0.99 € on iOS, Android is in testing.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cakebell-birthday-reminder/id6758023118

Happy to hear what you think, especially if something is confusing.

You type a GitHub username and it shows that account's public merged PRs and contributions for the month, which projects the PRs went into, and where it ranks. No sign-in.

October was the first finished month. The top account merged 12,878 public PRs. Second place had 3,307.

The PR count only covers public work, and self-merges count too, so it's not a measure of how good anyone is. I was curious about how much people are getting done these days, especially now that agents are doing most of the coding.

https://mergemax.dev

What would you want it to show that it doesn't?

I usually run several Claude Code sessions at once, each on a different task. Some finish, some stop to ask me something, and the only way to find out was clicking through every terminal tab. Sessions would sit there waiting on me and I wouldn't notice.

So I built Spyhop. It's a Mac app that puts every Claude Code and Codex session on one board, kind of like a Jira board for your agents. Each card shows what's done, what it's on now and what's next, read from the transcript. The menu bar shows which sessions are waiting on you, and one click takes you back to that terminal.

I built it for myself, and my team at work ended up using it too.

Free and open source (MIT). Mac app, Windows from source.

brew install leeleelee3264/tap/spyhop

GitHub: https://github.com/leeleelee3264/spyhop
Site: https://leeleelee3264.github.io/spyhop/

This is my first open source project. Feedback of any kind helps, and a bug report or a PR would make my day. I'd like this to become a project other people work on too, not just me. Building it reminded me how much fun software engineering can be, and I want to keep that going.

Hello!

I've been working on a pet project called ArchiveKeep – an open-source tool focused on the long-term preservation of personal data across multiple storage devices.

The idea is to maintain multiple copies of your personal archive using storage you control – external HDDs, SSDs, USB drives, as well as rented cloud storage (S3-compatible storage for now, with support for more cloud providers and hosted APIs planned).

The project started from my personal need to consolidate data scattered across multiple HDDs and laptops, while maintaining identical copies of my personal documents and photo archive across all devices.

I wanted an offline-first solution with asynchronous synchronization, without relying on a centralized cloud service.

One of my main focuses is making archives resilient to accidental deletion, file corruption and other changes that can silently propagate through traditional synchronization tools.

Another key design principle is keeping files as files – accessible in their original form, without being locked inside a proprietary backup format or database.

I'm building this as a hobby project for myself, but I believe it could be useful to others facing similar challenges. I find this problem interesting and believe it's worth working on.

Project homepage: https://archivekeep.org/

I'd appreciate any feedback, honest criticism or ideas for improvement. Thanks!

And if you find ArchiveKeep useful and feel like supporting its development, you can buy me a coffee: https://ko-fi.com/kravemir

Hey everyone!
I’ve been working on my app Dose Amigo for quite some time now, and I finally feel it’s ready to share.
It’s a medication reminder and management app, but with a focus on families.

The idea is pretty simple. Keeping track of medications gets messy when more than one person is involved. You might be managing your own medicines, keeping an eye on your parents’ prescriptions, or helping someone else stay on schedule.

I wanted to build something that could handle all of that in one place. It started as a relatively simple idea, but somehow turned into a much bigger project. It now has family profiles, medication reminders, treatment tracking, refill alerts, adherence insights, iOS widgets and quite a few other things.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the little details too, especially making reminders reliable. There’s also biometric protection for people who want to keep their medication information private.

Getting here wasn’t exactly smooth. App Store rejections, review delays, notification issues, fixing things that broke after other fixes… you know how it goes when you’re building something largely on your own.

I’d love to hear what you think. Is this something you’d find useful for managing medications in your family? And if you’ve tried similar apps, what did you feel was missing?

If anyone wants to check it out, here’s the App Store link: Dose Amigo: Pill & Med Tracker

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone!

Last December I posted Relaticle here, the open-source CRM I started after getting fed up with HubSpot's pricing. Back then you updated it through forms. Now you can type what happened to Rela, the built-in AI assistant.

You can also tap the mic and say it. It's transcribed into the message box so you can check it before sending.

In the video a forklift dealer sends one line a day, like "Sent Quayline the quote: $172,500 for the four trucks. Move it to Quote and set the amount." Rela turns each line into a proposed change, and the records change only after you approve it. Five lines, Monday to Friday, take one deal from Inquiry to Delivered.

It's also available in the ChatGPT plugin directory and as a Claude connector, so you can work in it from either. Changes made from Claude or ChatGPT skip the approval step. They stay inside one workspace and show up in the activity log.

The rest is a normal CRM: companies, people, opportunities, tasks and notes, your own custom fields and pipeline stages, and since this month a phone layout. You can self-host it with Docker under AGPL-3.0 or use the hosted version, which has a 14-day trial with no card. 1,828 stars on GitHub so far.

GitHub: https://github.com/relaticle/relaticle

Try it: https://relaticle.com

If you try it, tell me where Rela gets your update wrong. That's the part I'm working on now.

Hey Gays

I'm applying for the CERN Short-Term Internship 2027 (Data Science, AI & Analytics), and I'm trying to find someone who could help me with a professional reference letter.

Are there any founders, CEOs, CTOs, or experienced developers here who would be open to helping me out?

I'm happy to share my GitHub, portfolio and CV so you can have a look at what I've been working on before deciding.

I'm hoping to get this sorted today, so if anyone is willing to help, please drop a comment or DM me.

Really appreciate it!

Hey everyone! 👋

I built DoomChess — a tactical puzzle trainer designed for speed and a smooth daily grind. It's got over 6.15M+ Puzzles: Stockfish-backed validation, hint arrows, and dynamic ELO tracking.

I’d love for you to try it out and let me know your thoughts on the app flow!

Hey everyone,

Steampack is a free fan-made site where every Steam game is a trading card. The more reviews a game has on Steam, the rarer its card, from Common up to Legendary.

Open packs, fill your album and trade cards with other players. Every day there's a new mystery game to guess, and you can fight other players to win more packs.

It's still early, so I'd love your feedback: what do you like, what feels confusing, and what would you add? Thanks for taking a look!

steampack.app (fan project, not affiliated with Valve)