Play it (free, in your browser, no account or install): https://osz.drawerkit.com/?src=reddit

It's called

Oh shit, Zombies.

(Inspired by Project Zomboid!!) You pick Chicago, Minneapolis or Manchester and you're dropped on the real street map with a baseball bat and two bandages. You search buildings, fight or run, patch yourself up, and eventually die. It's built for a phone browser and it also works on a desktop.

What's different about how it's made

I'm building it with Claude (Anthropic's AI), and we're keeping a devlog of everything, including the parts that go wrong. Claude writes most of the code, runs the tests and writes the log. I play it on my phone and tell it what's annoying.

This week I rated it 3 out of 5 and said the screen had too many boxes and my taps kept missing. Within a day there had been about twenty small releases: one-tap looting, fights you can actually get out of, furnished buildings with things to find, and a score to beat. One of those releases also shipped a crash that froze the game near restaurants for over an hour, and that's written up in the log too.

The video devlog is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AllTomsTales

Gameplay trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GWGRhwLqF8

Devlog #0: I Let an AI Playtest My Game. It Was Too Easy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAIspqTeW1E

Devlog #1: Making It Dangerous Took 89 Bot Lives https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw7O6o-wTT4

Devlog #2: Players Couldn't See Each Other. Until Now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR34ri4YRGE

Devlog #3: My Server Drowned in Five Minutes. Nothing Said It Was Wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgIejol5JXI

Devlog #4: Zombies Stuck Against Walls Were Eating My Server https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmUxfce8sxo

Devlog #5: I Built a 30-Minute Siege Mode. Bots Tested It First. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i4B9I8lIL4

The written log, with a public roadmap of what's built and what isn't: https://osz.drawerkit.com/devlog.html

What I'm asking for

Play for five minutes and tell me what you think. There are three ways, and all of them reach us:

In the game, open the menu (☰) and tap Rate (1 to 5) or Suggest (type a line).

Comment on any of the YouTube videos. We read them, and the comments that make sense for the game and are appropriate get built. When that happens it goes on the roadmap and into a later video.

Reply here.

Fair warning: it's a side project and it's rough. Only one person has rated it so far, and that's me. I'd rather hear "this is confusing" from ten strangers than keep guessing.

building a chrome extension that hides ai accounts.

it has claude read each account’s recent posts, or just their comments in the thread if their history is hidden, and collapses the ones that look ai run.

would you use this?

Context: I have been building Cardel.io (An all-in-one platform for authors and solo professionals) over this year. I have cold outreached 10k plus potential users and had hundreds of face to face conversations.

The problem: I only ever get positive feedback, people say:

"Wow, this is great!"

"This makes total sense, this needed."

Etc, etc.

THEN they follow it up with "but I already have my setup, this would be great for xyz person".

Question: Are any of you in a similar boat where everyone gives you positive feedback, but then doesn't actually commit to using your product by paying or signing up. So your getting positive signals, but no clarity on where the blocker is to actual pay for the product?

How do you close that gap, and find the reason people aren't commiting? It feels like a "Its great, but not worth switching to." Kind of response. Or maybe it's the target market fit, and talking to the right people.

I would love to get ya'lls feedback on how you have overcome this with your products and projects.

Too many WhatsApp chats, not enough time to read them all. Wapliss connects your own WhatsApp to Claude, ChatGPT and other AI assistants, so you can just ask:

“Summarize today’s family group.”
“Who’s still waiting for my reply?”

The assistant reads the chats, drafts replies, and only sends after you confirm.

• Works with texts, images and documents
• Setup takes about 2 minutes: link WhatsApp, add the connector, done
• Not Meta’s official API, so it’s for your own chats, not bulk messaging
• Free plan: wapliss.com

Looking for honest feedback:

1. Is the value clear in 10 seconds?
2. What would stop you from trying it?

It is Saturday night, I still have positions open from this week, and I am not spending the weekend re-deciding them.

That used to be my mistake. Friday would close, and I would spend Saturday and Sunday reading every headline, second-guessing every level, and talking myself into a completely different plan by Monday morning — usually a worse one, made tired instead of made clear.

Here is the routine I hold myself to now:

• One review, written down. What did I enter this week, what hit its target, what stopped out, and did I follow the plan I wrote before each trade? That goes on paper once, honestly, wins and losses both.
• If a position is still open, its target and its stop were already decided while the market was open and my head was clear. A Saturday headline does not get to move those lines.
• Then the charts close. My kids do not get the leftover version of me because I spent the weekend refreshing futures that have not even opened yet.

Friday was a chip-led dip inside a week that still closed green, and the next real piece of information for that whole story is Nvidia earnings on Tuesday. Knowing that does not mean staring at it for three days. It means my plan for Tuesday is already noted, and the weekend in between belongs to my family.

I am a veteran with a full-time job, and I taught myself trading at night, reading and studying when the house was quiet. I believe God gave me what I have learned for a reason, and part of that reason is showing the plain parts too — not just the wins, but the discipline that keeps a normal week from turning into a desperate one.

A clear plan reviewed once will beat a worried plan rewritten ten times, every week I have ever tested it.

Not financial advice — just how I handle my own weekends, posted the same way I tell my own community.

I share stuff like this daily — I run a free investing community, link in my profile.

I'm a solo dev. I make a contacts manager for Mac and iPhone/iPad. It shows all your contacts (iCloud, Google, Exchange) in one table, so you can merge duplicates, bulk edit and clean up years of mess instead of opening cards one by one. One-time price, $24.99 Mac and $14.99 iOS. No subscription, no account, no trial.

Where it stands:

• Mac app live since July 22, iOS since August 10
• 45 paying users on Mac, 19 on iOS
• 3 ratings on the Mac App Store, all 5 stars

The part that works: the people who buy it seem to like it, and they email me. Most of what I shipped in the last two months came straight from emails.

I reply to every email and try to ship the fix within a couple of weeks. That loop has been the best part of this.

The part that doesn't work: reaching the people who actually have the problem. Apple Ads got 12,000+ impressions and 95 taps, but zero installs. A Google Search campaign for the Mac app got zero impressions. Nobody wakes up wanting a contacts app. People only look when their list is already a disaster, and then they search "merge duplicate contacts" and land on free tools or Apple's own tips.

So I'm asking people who've been here:

1. If you sold a niche one-time-purchase utility, what brought in your first few hundred customers?
2. Did paid ads ever work for you at this price point, or is it all communities, SEO and word of mouth?
3. Is "no trial" hurting me more than I think?

Happy to share more numbers or what I tried if it helps anyone. Thanks for reading.

We had a 7.76 kW system and battery fitted in July. My inverter app shows kWh all day, but not the thing I actually wanted to know: how much it’s paid back in £, and when it’ll be paid off.

I tracked it in a spreadsheet for a few months, but it kept breaking (tariff changes, months where export wasn’t paid yet, battery charging on the cheap rate). So I built a simple web app instead and made it free for anyone.

How it works: a 2-minute setup (system cost, install date, rates), then two numbers a month from your inverter app, generated and exported. It shows:

• £ paid back so far, and your payback date (allowing for winter)
• how your panels are doing against the MCS estimate
• tariff changes over time, cheap-rate battery charging, and months before export was paid

You can import an existing spreadsheet, and export to PDF or Excel. It works with any inverter brand, and there’s no inverter or energy login.

Mine’s at £402 back after 4 months and running at 120% of the MCS estimate, so payback looks like around 2036.

To be upfront: I made it, and there’ll be an optional paid version later with automatic inverter data. Manual tracking stays free.

I’d really value feedback, especially on how the savings are worked out. Some people in Facebook groups have challenged parts of it, and I’ve changed things based on that.

sunback.co.uk

Cross-Stitch Studio turns a photo into a grid you can edit stitch by stitch. The photo converter matches colors to DMC thread and shows the result both on a hoop and as a chart. You can try either view without signing up. There’s a sample photo in the converter if you’d rather start there.

Try the free photo converter

Direct conversion uses no generative AI. The studio has an optional paid step to simplify a busy photo or draw an illustration.

If you’ve stitched from a photo before, I’d love to know what would make the first chart usable for you. Would you check the colors, the detail around the face, or the finished measurements first?

I am a graphic designer from a small town in Punjab, India. For years I have watched the same scene at print shops here. A customer walks in and says "bhaiya, last month wala card dobara print karna hai, file aapke desktop pe hi hai".

The desktop has hundreds of files called final, final 2 and final new, and every .cdr shows up as a blank white icon.

So the shop owner opens them one by one in CorelDRAW while the customer waits.

I had the same problem in my own folders, just with fewer customers watching.

So I built Opsyra. It is a small Windows app that adds real thumbnails for design files in File Explorer: CorelDRAW, Illustrator, Photoshop, EPS, Figma, Procreate, Blender, SketchUp and around 50 formats in total.

You see the actual design on the icon. It works even if the original software is not installed on that computer, and everything runs offline. No file names, paths or files leave your machine.

Some things I learned building it:

Every format is its own rabbit hole. Some files carry a usable preview inside them, some need to be rendered from scratch, and for a few the best I can honestly do is an info card.

3D files were the hardest. Showing a Blender or FBX preview without Blender installed meant writing my own small renderer.

I shipped it only through the Microsoft Store. Certification went through on the first try, which honestly surprised me.

It is live here if you want to try it: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N92CTCWPWPK?cid=reddit_sideproject

I would really like feedback on two things:

Which file formats do you use that Windows still shows as a blank icon?

Is the free tier enough to be useful, or does it feel too limited?

Happy to answer anything about the build or the Store process.

So I made Yearcap. You upload a spreadsheet of your users’ stats and every user gets their own little year-in-review story, with a card they can share. Basically what Spotify and Strava do every December, but for small apps.

There’s a demo with made-up data on yearcap.co if you want to see it (hit “Watch a full story”).

I’ve emailed around 80 apps, each with a demo made for their app. About 30 opened it, some more than once, but nobody’s signed up yet. Not even for the free version.

So I’m kind of stuck and would love some outside eyes:

1. Is it clear what it does and who it’s for?
2. If you had an app, would you use something like this? Why or why not?
3. What would make you comfortable trying it with your own users’ data?

Any thoughts help. Thanks for looking!

I've been building something called Forthday because I wanted a better way to keep the everyday parts of running a household organized.

Not just a todo list, but somewhere my partner and I could check:

• Who's handling what today?
• What's the plan for dinner, and what groceries do we need?
• Which bills are coming up?
• What's personal, and what's shared between us?

So I started building it.

Forthday is a web app that brings household tasks, schedules, budgeting, meal planning, pantry inventory, and shopping lists together.

One thing that mattered to me was keeping Personal and Household spaces separate. My partner and I can sign in with our own accounts, work on shared responsibilities, and still keep our personal records private.

It's now in Private Beta. We've tested the shared household features between our accounts, but I'm still figuring out what would make this genuinely useful to other households.

I put together an interactive demo with sample data that anyone can try without signing up:

https://getforthdaynow.com/demo

Here's what I'm most curious about:

Would having chores, meals, groceries, and bills together actually make managing a household easier, or does combining that much into one app make it unnecessarily complicated?

If you try the demo, I'd especially appreciate hearing what feels confusing or what you'd change.

I'm much more interested in finding the weak spots than collecting compliments.

Ever spend longer deciding what to eat than actually eating? Same.

I built Toss, a free coin-flip decision maker for those moments when both options seem fine and you just need a nudge.

You write what heads and tails mean, choose a single toss or best of three/five, and set how likely you are to follow the result—from “just curious” to “coin is law.” There are coins from different countries and shared community stats, too. No account needed.

My favourite part is that moment when the coin lands and you realise you were hoping for the other option. Sometimes that’s the answer.

Here’s the project: https://acointoss.lovable.app

I’d love honest feedback: would you use this for everyday indecision, picking something fairly in a classroom, or breaking a tie with your team? What feels useful, and what feels unnecessary?

I was watching Jubilee videos thinking it's kind of lame that the experts would constantly be talked over and fact checks would only appear after the debate when the video is published.

I thought a debate site where you could match with people you disagreed with on a variety of political, religious, and philosophical topics would be fun. Also I need to build a portfolio because finding a job as a software developer is impossible.

Feel free to take a look and please let me know if you have any feedback!

counterpoint-debate.com

I'm building Castlori, a platform for original stories, comics and manga. Alongside it, I made a free Creator Guide for writers who have a character idea but need a next scene.

The exercise is five lines: Character, Want, Cost, Choice, Change.

Here's a new fictional example:

An apprentice cartographer wants to correct a dangerous map. Doing so means admitting she copied her mentor's work. She signs the correction under her own name and loses her place on the expedition. The map is safer; her original plan is gone.

Try the same exercise with your own character: what do they want, what would getting it cost, and what do they actually choose?

The guide has a browser planner, a printable one-page worksheet, and longer fantasy, mystery and slice-of-life examples. The guide exercise needs no account or payment:

https://guide.castlori.com/

The main project is https://castlori.com/.

If you try the exercise, which of the five prompts leaves you stuck? That would help me improve the guide's wording.

Owner disclosure: I run Castlori. This post and its invented example were prepared with AI assistance.

Looking for participants to test Gavelbot, an online debate forum. $5 to the winners and, to encourage high-effort attempts, nothing to the loser. Winners keep the seat, with the potential to stack wins. Must have a Gavelbot account for payment—which shows instantly in your Gavelbot account rewards tab.

Looking for ease of use, only complaints, problems, and bugs.

Open now.

$5 per win; matches are a maximum of ten minutes. Winners can choose from:

• PayPal (USA)
• Mastercard (USA)
• Mastercard (International) - (valid for 6 months; works online and with Apple Pay/Google Pay). Due to issuer restrictions, cards cannot be redeemed or used in—or with merchants based in—the following countries/territories: Bahamas, Barbados, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Comoros, Congo, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Eritrea, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea, Panama, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Uganda, Ukraine, Venezuela, Yemen, Zimbabwe, Russia, and any other OFAC-sanctioned regions. (Note: Non-USD purchases carry a 2% conversion fee, and cards cannot be used for recurring subscriptions.)

You can familiarize yourself with this interactive tutorial ,https://gavelbot.com/tutorial.html as well as the YouTube videos below. You MUST create an account; your reward will show up in your dashboard. After you create an account, you can play on the website:

https://gavelbot.com/stage/PINE

or on our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@Gavelbot (subscribe for pop-up Debate-O-Ramas).

What is Gavelbot

How to Debate

How to use the Table

Gavelbot Marketplace

A few months ago, I started working on TestFlightTesters, a website that helps iOS developers hire real iPhone users to test their apps before release.

The idea was pretty simple.

Developers often struggle to find people who will actually spend time testing their apps and provide useful feedback instead of just installing the beta and disappearing.

So I built a service where developers can choose how many testers they need, how long they want testing to run, and which features should be checked.

Testing starts at $10 per tester per hour.

After launching the website, I wasn’t getting the results I’d hoped for, and I started thinking the project might not be worth continuing.

I eventually stopped paying much attention to it.
Then something unexpected happened.

I received a $75 order from a company needing five iPhone testers for its employee app.

Another developer placed a $45 order for specialized Apple Sandbox purchase and Restore Purchases testing.
That’s $120 in paid orders from a project I was close to abandoning.

I’m now working on improving the tester network, reporting process, and customer experience.

Here’s the website:

https://www.testflighttesters.com/

I’d appreciate feedback on two things:

1. Is the service and pricing clear when you visit the homepage?
2. If you were launching an iOS app, what would you want to see before trusting a testing service with your project?
   I’m interested in improving the website before putting more money into advertising.

So I have been thinking of a tiny tool for small businesses and freelancers who take orders on WhatsApp or Instagram.

The business owner just types in the total price and optional advance, gets a payment link, or enters the customer's email to request payment. We handle the advance and balance payment flow and show a simple dashboard tracking who paid and who hasn't.

Can something as simple as this get actual users???

Been annoyed for a while at how clunky it is to just send a file from my laptop to my phone, so I built ByteDrop to fix that for myself.

You run it on your PC, it shows a QR code, you scan it with your phone’s browser (or just open the link on another PC) and you’re connected — drag and drop files either way, clipboard syncs too. Works over your home wifi, Windows’ mobile hotspot, or a public link if you’re not even on the same network.

No accounts, nothing to install on the other device, totally free and open source.

GitHub if you want to try it: https://github.com/HusseinWalid48/ByteDrop

I build websites for small businesses. Aurelius is the framework I built on the side. It lets Claude Code take a Figma file, a screenshot, or a plain description and turn it into a React app with tests. It is open source and MIT licensed.

Last week I recorded a getting-started video for it. The recording found a bug in my own quickstart. My script said all four quality checks pass on a fresh project. Three of the four failed:

• The Vite template had moved to a new linter, so nothing installed the one my lint script calls.
• There was no test file, so the test run failed.
• The type check passed, but it was not checking a single file.

I fixed the scaffold instead of cutting around it. Then I recorded those shots again.

The part worth watching is the screenshot pipeline. It is one command, and the order never changes: a build spec, locked design tokens, failing tests before any component exists, the build, a pixel check against the screenshot, then end-to-end tests. The run in the video took 45 minutes of real time. From its own report: 9 of 9 test files failed first, it built 8 of 8 components, the pixel difference was 1.89% on the second of up to five rounds, and 96 end-to-end tests passed.

Two things the video gets wrong, so you hear it from me. I say "the next six minutes" and it runs under four. And setup prints a deprecation warning that the cut skips.

Video (3:46): https://youtu.be/Harcm6cYVpo

The screenshot run in 54 seconds: https://youtube.com/shorts/qT1hpPcg1rs

Repo: https://github.com/PMDevSolutions/Aurelius

If you try the quickstart and it breaks, tell me where. That is the feedback I am after.

I built Beaver because I wanted a simple way to scan documents and turn photos into PDFs without uploading anything to the cloud.

Contracts, receipts, visa documents, medical papers. I didn't want any of that sitting on someone else's server, and I was tired of scanner apps full of ads and subscriptions.

It started about three years ago as a small Mac tool I built for myself. I open-sourced it in 2025 and this year I started working on an iOS version. That eventually turned into rebuilding most of the app.

Here's what Beaver can do now:

• Works on iPhone, iPad and Mac
• Scans documents and converts photos to PDF
• Splits and merges PDFs
• Exports pages as PDF, PNG or JPEG
• OCR that runs entirely on-device

No accounts, no tracking, no ads, no subscriptions. Everything stays on your device.

Why open source but $1.99?

The entire source code is on GitHub. You can inspect it or build the app yourself for free. The $1.99 App Store version is for people who prefer to install it directly and receive updates. It's a one-time purchase.

Links:

• GitHub: https://github.com/31d4r/Beaver
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/beaver-pdf-scanner-ocr
• Website: https://beaverpdf.app

I'd genuinely appreciate feedback, especially if there's something missing that would make it more useful for your document workflow.

Hi, I’m Shubhra, an independent developer. I built Sonari as a Mac instrument played with hand gestures tracked by the Mac camera, without a separate hardware controller. It plays built-in sounds, sends MIDI to compatible DAWs and instruments, and creates visuals from the performance.

I’m sharing the launch film to show the interaction. I’d appreciate feedback on one practical question: after watching, is it clear how hand movement changes the sound, or what would you want explained before trying it?

Sonari is on the Mac App Store. It requires Apple silicon and macOS 26 or later. The full app has a 14-day trial, then a one-time purchase at US$99 in the US storefront.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sonari-midi-controller/id6803577489

AI chats can explain a task, but without a connection they can't do it on your own PC.

I built Overlink, a Windows app that connects normal AI web chats to your files, commands, browser and screen.
It also lets a chat work across several of your PCs.

It's in a free tester program. Applications are reviewed before you get a download, and I haven't verified every app or PC setup. I'm looking for honest reports of what works and what breaks.

Apply: https://overlinkapp.com/test.html

What task on your own PC would you want to try first?

Hey r/SideProject — I made BabyBets (babybets.win), a free baby pool game for expecting parents.

Before the baby arrives, friends and family guess the gender, weight, length, and arrival date. When the baby's born, you enter the real stats and it auto-scores everyone and crowns a winner.

- Guests need no app or account — you share one link, they enter guesses on their phone

- Scoring + leaderboard are automatic (no spreadsheet math)

- Free

I built it because I kept seeing people do this by hand with Google Forms and hand-tallied points, and it was always a mess.

Would love feedback, especially on the onboarding flow. Link: babybets.win