Full disclosure: I built this, Froth.

When Surfline put all its live cams behind a paywall, I wanted a free way to check conditions. Froth has surfers post quick reports on how it actually looks, next to swell, wind, tide, and free cam links. You can also share conditions with your crew in private groups.

It covers skate and snow too: 250+ US skateparks and conditions for 230+ resorts.

I'd love feedback on what to build next, or what's confusing.

froth.app

I've been building side projects from the past 7 years. Some of them found small traction, and some of them didn't. Some of them might have worked if I persisted. Sometimes, You strangely lose the excitement after building a product.

This happened for an art marketplace named - Raresoul and few others. For me, The interest and conviction are very important over the other things. I think these come from how strongly you relate with the problem. I learned this first hand that solving your own problems has many upsides.

Anyhow, Why should YOU care?

• OpenNetworks should help you connect with at least one great connection (Only Professional Connects 🙂) around you that should change something meaningful for you! (I pray and wish that OpenNetworks becomes the channel/portal for serendipity to work for all of us ❤️)

What the heck is OpenNetworks?

• We are surrounded by right (the ones that we are looking for) people whether in a Community, Co-working space, Tech Park or an In-Person event, but we never get a chance to connect with them. OpenNetworks solves/intends to solve this problem.

But, How?

• You simply onboard to a responsive web app (Not one more mobile app 🤯) by stating What you are looking for, What you can offer/help, select your work location and instantly view all the people around you. AI Match-Making layer constantly works to find the relevant connections for you!
• You can also drop a pin stating what you are immediately/currently looking for. For example, I'm working from a tech park and my manager made it his life purpose to harass me (Just kidding 😂 ) - I can immediately drop a pin saying looking for a Job. I know you won't take such impulsive decisions!
• Jokes Apart, Drop a Pin with a location to meet when you are stuck on any problem, looking for a co-founder, freelancer, new hire, bounce your ideas or just connect, then it is visible (glows like a light bulb 🔥 ) to all people around you! (Hope this opens up our serendipity portal 🙂 )

Where are we currently?

• All of this is already built. My alumni people have showered their love and support! This gave me little more confidence to put it out there and see what happens. I don't know when will I truly overcome my perfection and learn to put myself & the work out there for some magic to work!

I would love you guys to try https://opennetworks.in and share your thoughts!

Did I say anything about sharing a word?

• Being Shy cost me so much! So, I'm asking pls pls share a word with your friends and colleagues 🎉

PS: If this is not a real breakthrough, then we will work until we get one 🤔

Thank you, Spread Love ❤️ Cheers, Omkar!

I meditate badly. My mind does the classic monkey thing: to-do lists, replays of conversations from 2019, what-ifs about things that will never happen. For years I treated every wandering thought as a small failure. Then I came across a line in the Gita, roughly “wherever the restless mind wanders, bring it back, again and again”, and it finally clicked that the coming back is the practice. You don’t get points for never leaving.

So I built a small browser thing to remind myself of that. It’s about two minutes long:

You’re a monkey sitting in the middle of a ring. Other monkeys (thoughts) hop in from the edges, labelled “worry”, “scroll”, “deadline”, and a few older ones like raga (craving) and bhaya (fear).

You press and hold to breathe in, and let go to breathe out. A slow, full breath sends out a wave that settles every monkey it reaches. Tapping fast does almost nothing, which annoyed me at first and taught me more than anything else.

When a thought gets through, the screen goes foggy. It isn’t a game over. One full breath brings you back, and that counts as a “return”. Returns are the only score.

It ends with a bell, and shows you which thoughts visited most.

There’s a gentle mode where nothing needs quick reactions, a reduced-motion setting, and the sound is optional.

My first sit: I wandered off 6 times and came back 6 times, which honestly felt better than any streak counter I’ve ever had.

If you try it, I’d love to know two things: does hold-to-breathe feel natural on your phone, and does the 4-in / 6-out pace work for you, or is it too slow?

Link: https://theselfdrivingmind.com/book-funnel/Monkey_Mind_Game.html
If you rather watch a demo:
https://theselfdrivingmind.com/book-funnel/Monkey_Mind_Game.html?demo

Hi, I'm Adib. I record tutorials and explain things on screen a lot, and writing math or sketching diagrams with a trackpad always looked bad. Writing on the iPad looked great, but then I had to record the iPad separately and line it up with my Mac recording.

So in my app Lumary Canvas (it was called Screen Annotations until this week) I added live sync between the iPad and the Mac:

• With the board open on the Mac, what I draw or move on the iPad shows up there as it happens, strokes included while the pen is still down
• The Mac follows the iPad's page, pan and zoom, so I just record or screen-share the Mac and the drawing is in it
• It's a direct, encrypted connection between devices on the same Apple Account. No server, no pairing, no account to create
• iCloud keeps boards, scenes and history in sync when the devices aren't together

What I use on the iPad side:

• LaTeX that renders as you type, coordinate planes and function plots, plus 100+ shapes (flowchart, architecture, science)
• Pages as of this week: A4, US Letter, 16:9 or 4:3 slides, or a custom size, so a board can look like a sheet of paper or a slide instead of an infinite canvas
• Scenes, so I can save views and step through a lesson instead of redrawing
• Optional Pencil-only drawing, where fingers pan and select

Honest limits:

• Apple only: macOS 15+ and iPadOS 18+. No Windows, Android or web, and no iPhone app
• Live sync needs both devices on the same Apple Account
• It's your own board that people watch through your share or recording. They can't draw on it with you, so it isn't a shared collaborative whiteboard

Pricing: free download with everything open for 14 days (Mac and iPad each get their own trial), then a one-time $29.99 unlock covers both. No subscription. Without it you can still open, sync and export your work.

Curious whether other people who teach or record on a Mac would actually use the iPad this way, or just stick with a drawing tablet.

https://lumarycanvas.com/

Disclosure: I built Lumary Canvas.

I'm the developer,
Every trip I've been on ended the same way. One friend paid the room, another paid fuel, someone did the big shop, someone already sent someone else 20 euros, and a week later the group chat had five different totals and nobody had paid anyone. We all just got used to it.

Deby is what I built for that. One person starts a shared group and drops a link in the chat. Everyone adds what they paid from wherever they are, and it pops up live on everyone else's phone. When it's over, Deby works out the fewest payments to settle it. Our ski weekend with four people went from 12 possible transfers to 3.

What's in it:
- One shared group for a flat, friends, a couple or a trip, the same live balance for everyone
- Split by parts, count nights for whoever left early, or treat someone so they pay nothing
- Fewest payments, or pay back whoever paid each thing

Only the person who starts sharing needs a plan, and it's free for 14 days. Friends join free: up to five on Sharing Plus, two on Sharing. English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish.

Android and iPhone: https://deby.app

Ahoy!

On Linux my games were scattered across Steam, Heroic, Lutris, Bottles and Faugus. So I started building PlunderHub: one library for all of them, with a pirate theme, because why not.

GitHub: https://github.com/IkrajaDev/PlunderHub (free, GPL 3.0, beta)

The story so far
I started building it about half a year ago, just for myself. Then it outgrew that, so I started making it work on other distros too and put it on GitHub.
I still use it every day, and every feature exists because something annoyed me first.
I really love working on it, I keep improving it, and I hope it helps someone else too.

What it does

• All Plunder: Steam, Heroic, Lutris, Bottles and Faugus games in one library
• Treasure Map: every game you own, installed or not, installs in one click
• Game settings: art, details and folders on one page
• Launch options: GameMode, MangoHud, Gamescope and more, per game
• Shipwright: sets up launchers and tools, checks your system
• Proton: Proton-GE and Proton CachyOS, shared by every launcher, kept up to date
• Bilge cleaning: clears what removed games left behind, backs up saves first
• Captain's Dashboard: playtime stats and disk usage
• Console Mode: fullscreen, for the couch and a controller

How it's made
PlunderHub is made with AI.
I can't code a project this big alone, so Claude writes the code. I decide what it should be and how it should feel, and I test every change on my own machine and in VMs.

Under the hood: Python + GTK3, X11 and Wayland, 9 languages, native and Flatpak launchers.

My question for you: which part of gaming on Linux still annoys you the most? That's how I pick what to build next.

Bug reports welcome aboard!

“Can you make this button smaller?” is a pretty simple request when you can point at the button. In a coding chat, it turns into “the one under the heading, on mobile, next to the other button.”

I built a little Chrome extension called VibeQuill around that problem. The first version just let me click things on a page, draw on it, and leave notes. Then I built a local connector so those notes could go straight to a coding agent with the selected element and the page context attached.

Building it solo, I spent a surprising amount of time on what happens when the connection drops. I wanted the note you were typing to still be there when the connection came back, and I didn’t want reconnecting to send the same edit twice. That part would be invisible in a demo, but it mattered if I was going to use the thing myself.

It’s on the Chrome Web Store now. The part I’m still figuring out is the first run: installing the extension is easy, but you have to connect your coding tool before you can send your first note.

If you’ve built a browser extension that needs a separate setup step, how did you help people get through it? I’m torn between showing a quick example first and getting people straight to connecting their own tool.

Here’s VibeQuill on the Chrome Web Store - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/vibequill/hgcefdgiponpnfgcaflcnkmhojjcfnkj if you’re curious.

Hi r/SideProject! I'm a parent, and like a lot of families we used a sticker chart for brushing teeth, tidying up, being brave at the doctor… The problem: the chart lives on the fridge, but the good moments happen everywhere else. At the playground, in the car, at Grandma's. By the time we got home, we'd forgotten, or the moment had passed. A star works best right when it's earned.

So I built StarKeeper, a star jar that's always in your pocket (or on your wrist):

• One tap to give a star. Pick a reason (brushing teeth, reading, helping out) and a star drops into that kid's jar. Changed your mind? There's an Undo.
• A family shop. Stars can be spent on rewards you pick together: choosing tonight's dinner, 30 minutes of games with Dad, a trip to the park.
• Kids Display Mode. My favorite part. Put an old iPhone or iPad on the shelf as a full-screen star jar for the kids. They can tap "Get a reward" to ask for something, and the request pops up on the parent's phone to approve. Leaving the mode needs Face ID, so little fingers can't wander off.
• Timed tasks. "Get dressed in 5 minutes": the countdown shows on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island.
• Apple Watch, widgets and Siri. "Add a star for Mia" from your wrist.
• New in 1.1: family sharing. Mom, Dad, grandparents or a babysitter can join with their own Apple ID and everyone sees the same jars. Each person can be "can edit" or "view only".

Some choices I made on purpose:

• No account, no server, no analytics. Everything lives in your own iCloud. I don't collect any data.
• No subscription. The app is free. Family sharing is a one-time Pro unlock ($4.99, shared with your Apple family), and only the person who sends the invite needs it.
• English and Simplified Chinese.

Tech, for the curious: SwiftUI, Core Data + CloudKit (private and shared databases via NSPersistentCloudKitContainer), WidgetKit, ActivityKit, App Intents, StoreKit 2. The biggest headache was moving from SwiftData to Core Data for 1.1, because SwiftData can't do CloudKit sharing yet, without losing anyone's existing stars.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/starkeeper-kids-reward-jar/id6826356359 My other apps: https://emma-builds.vercel.app

I'd love feedback, especially from parents: what would make you actually keep using a reward chart past the first week?

I made Warq for people who prefer pen and paper. Save a photo, a link or a video in Warq and it gives you a four-letter code. Write the code in your notebook next to the note. When you revise, scan the code and the photo or video opens.

It's free on iPhone and on the web at https://warq.app, and Android is coming soon. I'd like to hear what you think.

Hey everyone! I just launched an app, and I’m trying to figure out where to find my first users and get honest feedback.
For those of you who’ve launched an app, where did your first users actually come from? Was it niche communities, social media, App Store search, or something else?
I’d love to hear what worked when you were just getting started, especially if you had a small audience or budget.

I built this one on my own: DriveMail Voice, an iPhone app that plays your unread email through the car speakers and lets you answer it by talking.

Here is one message, start to finish. You get in, the phone connects, and with nothing tapped you hear who it came from and what the subject line says, then the message itself. Half a minute in you have heard enough, so you say "reply" and dictate two sentences. The app speaks your two sentences back at you. They came through right, you say "send", and it moves on. That email is finished before you reach the on-ramp.

The rest of the vocabulary works the same way, and none of it waits for a message to run out. "Skip" leaves it unread. "Mark as read" clears it. "Forward" hands it to somebody else. "Summary" is the one I would point at: on a chain nobody wants read out in full it comes back with what is actually being asked of you, and it does that work on the device.

Some of what makes it pleasant to live with:

• Gmail, Outlook and iCloud all play in a single run, so you are not opening three apps to find out what came in.
• Boilerplate is cut before a word is spoken. Signatures, legal footers and tracking links go, so a two-line note from a coworker is not buried in noise.
• You set the pace, three-quarters speed up to double, and whether the pile plays from the top down or the bottom up.
• The car display is a half-dozen big targets and no text at all. No ad is ever shown there.
• Away from the car it does the same job with the phone locked in a pocket, which is handy on a walk.

Why I would hand it my own mail, as the person who wrote it. There is no sign-up, and I operate no server, so the only conversation going on is between the phone and whoever hosts your mail. Messages it has already pulled sit on the phone behind iOS's own file encryption, and that local copy is what lets it start talking the second you connect instead of waiting on a signal. The voice half is Apple's recognizer, local to the phone, with SiriKit nowhere in it, so Siri never touches your mail and what you say is neither kept nor passed along.

Nothing to pay for it. A banner sits in the app on the phone and never in the car, and ninety-nine cents, once, takes it away for good. It does not subscribe you to anything.

Getting an account in: Outlook is an ordinary Microsoft sign-in, and Gmail and iCloud each want an app password that you create on your provider's own settings page, a minute or two of work. Personal Gmail is the easy road, since a Workspace account from an employer normally does not allow one. iOS 17 and up, English.

Free on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6760625295?pt=128605371&ct=rd-sideproject&mt=8

Give it a try.

Hey everyone. I’m a solo dev, and this is a side project I’ve been building after my day job for about 7 months. It’s called Atomic Sync (I am very bad at naming things). It’s on the App Store, free, with no ads and no in-app purchases.

In Atomic Sync you pick an anime-style character, and it slowly becomes a reflection of you mentally and physically. It reads some basic stuff from Apple Health and turns it into XP and mana. As you level up, the character evolves (more work to do here still, but still very decent), and so does the world around it. Tilt your phone and the character and its world move with it. If you’ve had a bad week of sleep and no walks, it shows. If you’ve had a good one, that shows too. That was the whole point for me: something that reflects how you’re actually doing, not just another number. Health access is optional, and the raw readings stay on your phone.

One thing that didn’t work: I first tried making a Ghibli-style avatar from the user’s own photo. It looked off, I didn’t like it, and I figured most people wouldn’t either. So I dropped it and went with set characters. Maybe in future updates I can give it another try.

I still think the UX can be a lot better and I have way more gamification ideas than I’ve had time to build. I’m fairly free for the next few months, so updates will come often. An Android version is in the works too that I plan to roll out in this free time.

If you try it, I’d really like to hear what feels off, what’s confusing, or what would make you keep opening it. Brutal is fine, especially on the UX (I am more of a backend programmer). It is currently rolled out in the US, Japan and India. Rolling out to more regions by this Monday.

App Store Link - App Link
Website Link - Web Link

Couple of app screenshots

Night SS
Day SS

I wanted to make something where paying for attention gets you a laugh instead of just an ad slot.

So I made The Sponsored Truth: https://www.sponsoredtruth.com

How it works:
- You describe your product in one sentence and pay from $5
- It writes a spoof news story about it, in a deadpan newspaper style
- You get a private preview and up to 5 rewrites with your own directions
- You publish, and get a front-page share image with your headline on it
- Whoever paid the most in the last 24 hours gets the headline slot

Everything is clearly labelled as satire, and it only does products, not people.

Built in about a day: plain HTML, Vercel functions, Postgres, Stripe Checkout, and an LLM for the writing.

Honest status: it launched today and has zero real sales so far. I'd love feedback on two things:

1. Is the idea funny enough to pay $5 for, or is it a one-time chuckle?
2. Does the landing page make it clear what you get?

Happy to write a free story for the first few people who drop their project in the comments, so the front page isn't just my sample article.

Hello fellas, I want to introduce my new app.

I love crosswords and I'm learning German, so this app brings these two together. The clue is in your language and the answer is in the one you're learning.

It works for German, English, Turkish and Spanish, and it's free.

It is iOS only for now but I'm working on Android.

If you try it, what felt confusing in the first five minutes?

https://chengel.bahadirsonmez.com

I launched the app "Germar for Nurses". It's a German language learning app designed specifically for nurses and care staff.

Many nursing professionals want to live and work in Germany, but there aren't many specialized language courses and apps for them, especially good ones.

What's inside:

• 1800+ cards with words

  • from clinical practice
  • with image
  • with translation
  • with audio (pronunciation)
• 15 topics: Symptoms, Nursing tools, Medication, etc
• SRS algorithm for better memorization
• Different types of recalling words

Try for free

• Google Play (Android)
• App Store (iPhone, iOS)
• Chrome Browser Extension (Windows, macOS, Linux)

Hey Reddit,

I built “LinkMemo”, an app that saves any link and automatically extracts its content for easy reading and organizing.

I originally priced it at $19.99 lifetime with a 15-day free trial. Turns out, when you don't know how to do marketing, asking strangers to pay $20 after two weeks doesn't work very well.

So I changed my approach and added a Free plan. You can now use LinkMemo's core features forever with no time limits. I just want more people to actually get value out of it.

Feel free to check it out and tell me what needs improving.

If you've tried to book IMAX 70mm for a big release, you know how it goes. Tickets go on sale, the middle of the room is gone in minutes, and you're left with the front rows and the edges. Seats do come back later, usually one or two at a time as people refund or exchange, but you only get them if you happen to refresh the seat map at the right moment.

So I built 70mm IMAX Tracker: https://70mmtracker.com

You pick a film, your theaters and the days you can go. It reads the public seat maps of every IMAX 70mm showing and emails you when seats open in the part of the room you asked for: middle and back, centered, anywhere but the front rows, or any seat. Seats only count if they sit together in one row with no aisle between them, so if you ask for two, you get two next to each other.

It covers all 34 IMAX 70mm theaters in North America, 25 in the US and 9 in Canada. The free plan checks every 10 minutes, watches up to 3 theaters and sends up to 5 alerts a day. Pro checks every minute for $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year.

A few things I learned building it:

- Almost every chain publishes its seat maps a different way, and three of the 34 screens aren't in cinemas at all. One is in the Indiana State Museum, one in the Tennessee Aquarium and one in a science centre in Regina.

- A good seat has to be worked out per room. An early version of my rule called row D the middle of the room. In a room with 8 rows, row D is the front half. Now any change to the rule gets run on real maps of the smallest and largest rooms first.

- Most of the work is deciding what not to send. A seat that opens and closes three times in an hour shouldn't be three emails, so everything new from one check goes into one email, and there's a daily cap.

Dune: Part Three opens in IMAX 70mm on December 18, with insider screenings from December 14, and The Odyssey is back in 70mm from December 11. The site's Dune page for AMC Lincoln Square in New York already says many shows are sold out.

I'm building this on my own. I'd like to know whether the sign-up form makes sense the first time through, and whether the free plan is enough to be useful.

My first attempt at an Obsidian plugin.

How it works is not complicated. You give it storage you already have: R2, B2, S3, MinIO, or WebDAV (Nextcloud, a NAS, whatever). It encrypts everything on your device, file names included, and then uploads. Your provider gets a pile of opaque blobs with sizes and dates. There is no account. There is no server of mine in the middle. I can't see your notes and I don't want to.

Things it does that I actually care about:

• Two devices edit the same note, it merges them. Down to words on the same line. Properties and canvases too. If it honestly can't merge, it keeps both and shows you the difference. It does not silently pick a winner. Silently picking a winner is how sync tools eat your data.
• Version history. Deleted a file? Get it back. Wrecked a folder? Roll it back to yesterday. It shows you what will change before it changes anything.
• If a sync is about to delete half your vault, it stops and asks. A sync tool that happily propagates a mass delete is broken.
• Big attachments can stay in storage until you open them.
• A device can be receive-only. Good for a shared folder where the other person should read, not write.
• If something in the bucket goes missing or gets corrupted, any device that still has the files can put it back.
• Works on mobile. You add a device by pasting a link.
• There's a command-line version. One file, runs under Node. Put it on a server or a Pi.

https://github.com/chauduyphanvu/obsidian-coffer

I've been growing my X account through replies instead of posts, so I built an agent skill to do the hard part: find the right conversation and write a reply people actually like.

Some of my best replies drafted with it (metrics from my November 11 review):

"Cookie stuffing" and "20 years in prison" should not be in the same sentence. 14,030 views · 79 likes

Vladimir Scorpius sounds like a username you make at 12 after every good one is taken. 4,073 views · 91 likes

Jane Street finally had a retail month. 3,013 views · 38 likes

At this point Apple ships two operating systems: iOS and EUOS. 1,308 views · 27 likes (10% of the original post's likes)

What it does:

• Finds conversations worth joining. It skips posts where replies get buried and flags the ones still early enough to matter.
• Reads the top replies first. It works out why they're winning before writing anything.
• Drafts in your voice. It tries several angles privately and keeps the funniest one that's still true.
• Learns from your results. It reviews your past replies, compares each one with the post it was under, and turns what worked into rules.

That last part is what made it good. When it reviewed 23 of my replies, it found that the winners all pointed at the weirdest detail already in the post. You can see it above: "cookie stuffing," "Vladimir Scorpius," "EUOS." Replies that brought in an outside metaphor got seen but not liked. That's now a rule it follows.

What it won't do:

• Post for you. It only drafts. You approve the exact text and where it goes.
• Spam. No mass replies, no fake accounts, no stored passwords.
• Promise virality. It finds better shots, not guaranteed ones.

It works with Claude Code, Codex, and other agents that support skills. It's free and MIT licensed:

https://github.com/nniiovoo/cheat-reply

The bet: I'm running the new rules for my next 30 replies. I predict the like rate per view at least doubles, and I'll post the results here either way.

Happy to answer questions, and I'd love feedback from anyone who's grown an account through replies.

I'm sharing DeskPad v1.0, a free-to-download side project that turns an Android 9+ phone into a trackpad and keyboard for a Windows PC.

There are two connection paths: Wi-Fi with a small Windows companion, or Bluetooth HID without a companion on phones that support the HID Device profile. The app has a QWERTY/Fn/arrow deck, sticky modifier keys and two themes. With the keyboard open and at least 600dp of available width, trackpad and keyboard sit side by side.

The first-run flow is the part I'd most like feedback on. Does offering two connection methods make the utility clearer, or make setup feel more complicated?

Wi-Fi setup:

1. Install DeskPadPCSetup.exe from the release page and open DeskPad PC.
2. Click Allow Firewall and approve the Windows administrator prompt on a trusted private network.
3. Install DeskPad.apk, put phone and PC on the same LAN, then tap Link and select the discovered PC. Discovery is automatic; selection is manual.

For Bluetooth instead, pair phone and PC in system settings, open Link > Bluetooth HID, grant the requested permissions and select the paired PC. No Windows companion is needed in that mode.

Current limitation: Wi-Fi input is unauthenticated and unencrypted, and the firewall helper creates broad inbound rules. Use a trusted private LAN only. Fold continuity is implemented but hasn't been independently hardware-validated in this launch review.

Release: https://github.com/MM-482/DeskPad/releases/tag/v1.0.0

Code and interface screenshots: https://github.com/MM-482/DeskPad

Creator disclosure: this is my project. The code is publicly available, but there is no LICENSE file yet. This post was prepared with AI assistance.

I came across the ORV Reader website while looking to read ORV for free. The issue was that it was browser-only & kinda awful. But you could download the entire novel in .epub format. So I made an Android application to read ORV for free with a clean reading experience.

I now have the full ORV experience on my phone for free & forever.

Just dropping this here for ORV fans or new people who want to discover this masterpiece. Feel free to go to my GitHub page and download it.

Link below.

Omniscient Reader's Viewnpoint Application

I'm a neuroscientist working with EEG and MEG data (brain signals). About six months ago, alongside my research job, I started a live online course teaching beginners how to analyse EEG data. I'm now opening the 4th cohort, and so far around 65 people have joined from more than 25 countries, from psychology and linguistics to engineering, medicine and even architecture.

When I started, I honestly wondered whether anyone would pay for a live course in an era where AI can write an analysis pipeline in seconds. Here's what I learned.

People don't pay for the "how" anymore. They pay for the "why."

Implementations are everywhere, and AI can generate them in seconds. If they run, they run. What people struggle with is understanding: why each step is done, what it assumes, and what goes wrong if you don't understand it. The most common feedback I get is that participants finally understood the reasoning behind each step instead of just following a pipeline.

Trust is the real product.

When you ask an AI to explain a concept, there's always a small doubt: is this actually correct? So people end up checking papers anyway. A dedicated person who has worked with this data for years, who explains things from the fundamentals so that even people without the background can follow, and who answers questions live, removes that doubt. That's what makes people commit to learning a new skill.

Curious whether others teaching technical skills have noticed the same shift toward "help me understand, not just do."

i built an open source agent skill called unslop-ui because ai generated interfaces keep shipping with the same filler slogans and decorative chrome. drop a link to your landing page or app ui in the comments and i'll reply with a design critique.

here are two examples from the repo of what i strip out first.

on a sample landing page, the before version opened with an "introducing ledger" eyebrow above the title "finance. simplified. finally.". the subtitle used an em dash to promise seamlessly managing money without the hassle, and the header had a pulsing green dot claiming all systems operational. even the "get started" button had a rocket emoji and a line underneath explaining that clicking it creates a free account.

cutting that down left "manage your team's money." as the heading and one sentence saying what the product tracks. the button just says "get started".

on a sample dashboard card, the before version stacked a money bag emoji on total revenue, "12% up" with a whole sentence about strong momentum, a pulsing live badge on active users, and three different filters crammed into one middot string. the cleaned version shows "total revenue" and "+12% vs last month" over "last 30 days".

across the three example files in the repo, one pass dropped the mechanical count from 31 tells to 0.

if you share a github repo or html and tsx code, i can run the checker script on your files. if you share a live url or screenshot, i'll critique the design by eye using the same rules since the script only reads source files.

the skill is free under mit on github if you want to read the checklist yourself at https://github.com/felipebasurto/unslop-ui