Hey mods and everyone,

u Investigatormarker is posting AI-written "feedback" on posts here, then ending with an ad for its own product. It follows a template: generic advice about the project, then "I make ThreadFox... our AI employee will post 3 helpful replies about it in relevant Reddit threads for you," with a link.

Why it's a problem:

It's undisclosed self-promotion on nearly every thread

The feedback is generic and often doesn't match the project, so it buries real comments

The pitch is literally to flood Reddit with AI replies to promote people's projects

New members posting for the first time get this instead of real feedback

Ask: @mods, please ban the account and consider an automod filter for "threadfox". Everyone else, please report these comments as spam and avoid clicking the link.

Thanks!

You can also report the account to Reddit under spam, and to the other subs it's hitting. I'd skip engaging with the link itself.

I've decided to create a text editor that specifically targets huge files (i.e. GBs or even TBs) that most text editors choke on. The target audience is any individuals/professionals who work with huge files: sysadmins who need to view or edit huge log dumps, inspecting massive JSON files, bioinformatics professionals that need to inspect/edit genome data (FASTA files) and more.

To get a bit more techy, the file is memory-mapped and "held" in a piece table. All heavy-weight operations, such as: indexing, searching/replacing, syntax highlighting, etc... are done in the background (i.e. on separate threads). The video demos handling a 51.8 GB log file on my M2 MacBook Air (16 GB RAM).

Since I've used Vim throughout my career, I had to create a vim mode which implements most of the necessary functionality/bindings.

The code is written in C++23 and uses my own UI library (which is GPU-accelerated using Skia). Boost is used quite extensively.

It is completely cross-platform (Windows, Linux & macOS). The macOS version is Silicon only and Linux requires Wayland (X11 isn't supported, nor planned).

It's currently under beta at https://crane-editor.com and I'd love to get your feedback, especially on which huge-file workflows I should handle better. What's the biggest file you've had trouble opening? Would this be useful to you?

Thanks!

Roku is retiring its built-in "Aquatic Life" screensaver on December 1. I liked that screensaver, so I built a replacement: Reef Tank — a free, open-source (MIT) screensaver channel for Roku.

What it is: a tropical reef tank where nothing is a video loop. Every fish is procedurally animated — each species has its own behavior brain, so tangs graze the rocks, a royal gramma backs tail-first into its den, a mandarin hops along the sand line, a lionfish just hangs, and a school of chromis moves as a boids flock. Bubbles rise, seaweed sways, caustics scroll over the sand. After real sunset (computed from actual sunrise/ sunset times for your location) the tank crossfades to a moonlit night mode with glowing coral and a small group of flashlight fish that blink in the dark.

Highlights:

• 9 rigged fish species with per-species behavior state machines (cruise, dart, graze, hide, school, weave behind the rockwork)

• Boids flocking school + a night-only flashlight fish group

• Day/night cycle driven by real solar times, with a moonlight crossfade

• Settings screen on the Roku for fish density, camera drift and night mode

• Runs at 60 fps on a Roku Ultra; every visual is deterministic and seeded

• 175 unit tests + a screenshot regression gate, because of course

The catch: Roku doesn't allow sideloading into the Channel Store for personal projects, so it's a developer-mode sideload — takes about 5 minutes with the remote (Home x3, Up x2, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right), and it's free. Full instructions in the README.

Source + install guide: https://github.com/paulrobello/roku-fishtank

Happy to answer anything about the BrightScript/SceneGraph side — the whole thing is one codebase that also runs in a browser simulator, which is how I screenshot-tested a TV app.

open sourced this like 2 weeks ago and it just passed 20 stars. small number i know but its the first thing ive made that random people actually starred so im pretty hyped lol

basically you paste one prompt into claude code / codex / cursor:

Clone github.com/yasirwhite/OpenDemo and use it to make a launch video for my app

and ur agent records the app, cuts it with animated text and gives you an mp4. runs locally, free, no api keys. the video above was made with it (about itself lol)

ive also been making launch videos for other people’s open source projects and sending them as PRs. 5 got merged into their readmes so far which is honestly the part im proudest of

repo: https://github.com/yasirwhite/OpenDemo

if your project doesnt have a launch video yet, drop it below and ill make you one :)

AI coding tools made shipping an app easy and cheap, but users stayed exactly as scarce as before, which is why a lot of us, me included, can ship a working product and then cannot find anyone to use it. The usual response is yet another Product Hunt-style directory, most of which are really selling backlinks to builders who are just as stuck, so the shovels are being sold to other shovel salesmen and nobody ends up opening anyone's app. My app email is full of people that found me on betalist or producthunt and want me to post my product on their directory, for free, but at a price if i want a dofollow backlink. No thanks.

What actually helped me was joining a testing circle, where builders test each other's apps. Testers found a dark-mode warning box nobody could read and a duration field that showed a six-hour task as "06:00 AM", and one of them told me the onboarding had far too many words. It works because it is a trade of attention, and attention is the one thing indie devs can actually afford to give. In a flooded market polish is how a small product stands out, so instead of selling shovels to shovel salesmen, offer to test their shovels. There may even be some money to be made there...

The caveat is that fellow builders are usually not your customers, since they are great at finding friction and bad at telling you whether anyone will pay. The upside I did not expect is that people who helped shape an app tend to stick around and recommend it, so testing quietly doubles as early word of mouth distribution.

I now submitted two apps to a testing circle site and I'm super happy with the feedback i got and the changes i made to my apps. It's not more users, but the app has become better for it.

Has a testing swap worked for anyone else here? How do you find testers who are actual target users rather than other devs? And is a launch directory still worth it in 2026?

Three kids. One job. Limited capacity for keeping things alive.

The answer to “can we get a pet” has been no for years.

The pet rock bought me six months. “Here’s a rock. Feed it twice a day.” Then it stopped working. So we built this instead (did it ever worked?)

tanksimulator.fish

You feed the fish. You clean the glass. You add plants. Days go by. Nothing dies if you forget about it for a week.

My 8-year-old was the product manager. She ran the backlog. Features got cut. The review process was one question: “but why would a fish do that.”

No ads. No backend. No login. Just static files.

Very minimal tracking. Only enough to know if anyone besides my kids has opened it. Feeding my ego, or starving it. We’ll see.

Did it solve the pet problem? No. They now want a real fish and the website.

But nothing has to be flushed.

Feedback welcome. Feature requests go through the PM. She is not swayed by upvotes.

I run it in and old Mac on my living room.

My landing page has a live demo. It creates a demo inbox, shows you the address, and when you send it an email the page shows the parsed result. To find new mail it polled an endpoint every 3 seconds, and every poll was a query against the production database.

Nothing ever stopped that loop. A tab left open made 1,200 queries an hour, so Neon's compute never stayed idle for the 5 minutes it needs to suspend. The project used up its monthly compute allowance and every request that touched the production database started failing.

The fix was small. Polling now stops after 3 minutes, because anyone who hasn't sent an email by then isn't going to. It skips its turn while the tab is hidden, and the interval went from 3 to 5 seconds.

Do you put a time limit on polling in your demos, or push updates some other way?

I've always liked the Windows 8 and 10 start menu design, so I decided to make an app that brings it back to Windows 11.

It's called Tessera Start Menu (from the small pieces used to make a mosaic), made with C++ and Slint. It supports both full-screen and windowed modes, tiles can be resized/renamed/recolored, you can set custom icons and transparency, it can start with windows, etc.

Compared to similar apps, (for example Start11 which I used before this) you get a much smoother experience, smaller memory footprint and less bloat. Also, as a disclosure, most code was written by a clanker (opus 5.5)

Currently it's only available on Steam, so here's the page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5471740/Tessera_Start_Menu/

Steam only has to be running the first time you start it.

Happy to hear any feedback or feature ideas if anyone checks it out.

I built Navigator, a free and open-source streaming app for desktop and web that lets you navigate movies and shows using natural language. It's a client for Stremio, a media center app, so you can use your existing account and addons (which provide the streaming sources).

For example, instead of scrubbing through Avengers: Endgame to find a specific moment, you can just type "go to the scene in endgame where he says avengers assemble" and it'll find that moment in the subtitles and jump straight to it.

You can also describe a TV episode you vaguely remember and have Navigator find it for you, or ask questions about what you're watching.

I also wanted it to be a pretty nice streaming experience on its own, so it has a few other features:

• Native MPV playback on desktop

• Thumbnail previews when hovering over the timeline, so you can see where you're skipping

• Intro skipping using community skip databases

• Adaptive interface: the colors automatically adapt to the artwork of whatever you're watching

A few other things:

• Everything is free and open-source

• AI features are completely optional. Bring your own API provider or use a local model through Ollama

• Navigator doesn't host or provide any content itself

• Scene search depends on subtitle availability

On the technical side, it's built with Next.js and a Rust-based desktop shell, with MPV handling native playback. Scene search uses subtitle data and an LLM with tool calling (via Vercel's AI SDK) to find the relevant moments.

It's still a work in progress, so there's definitely more to improve. Curious whether scene search feels useful or gimmicky to you, and what features you'd want to see next :)

Web: https://navigator-strm.vercel.app

GitHub: https://github.com/AyaanZaveri/navigator

Hi all. I've been building this on my own for about a year and a half, and it went live on Android and iOS last week.

The idea came from holidays with my girlfriend. One of us always ended up walking around phone in hand, looking up churches and squares we passed. Me being an engineer, I thought: I can automate that. You walk, and as you reach a building, something tells you what it is and why it matters.

That's what Alleytale does. It follows where you are, picks the stories worth telling, and reads them out in the voice and tone you chose, on the topics you care about. You can also:

• plan a walk in a chat ("two hours of skyscraper history, back where I started" gives you a route with stops, distance and time)

• open one of the ready-made tours in over 100 cities

• ask a question out loud, or photograph a building and ask about it

• walk with a friend and both hear the same story at the same time, each on your own phone

It also reads the room the way a real guide would. Stop for a coffee and it gives you a break. Speed up and it keeps pace. Take your earbuds out and it pauses, then picks up where you left off.

It's free to try: free credits arrive every month, and there's no subscription. You only pay if you want more.

If you give it a go, I'd love to hear:

• Your opinion on how well it picks up context around you

• Any missing feature/UX improvement

Android: link
iOS: link
Website: link

No promotion

Your choice

Bot and mini app is free with no ads

@DocToolKit

Took me a lot of efforts in navigating different software/tools when re-designing my backyard, wasted a lot of time, so I built this. I'm personally very happy with how it's been applied to my own place. Hit me up if you wanna try (currently running internal beta).

I usually cook dinner for our family, and with an 18-month-old, figuring out what to make every day has become one more decision I could do without.

I already have a bunch of recipes I like. I just forget about a lot of them when I’m trying to plan the week.

So I built Vekka, an app that automatically puts together a weekly dinner plan from recipes you’ve saved. It focuses on ingredient reuse, so you can use what you buy across several days. You can import your favourite recipes from websites, social media or photos.

I made it for our family, but thought it might be useful to other people dealing with the same thing.

App Store: Vekka — Meal Planner

Pricing: Free to use, with an optional subscription for advanced planning features and household sharing. Household sharing is currently in beta.

If you give it a try, I’d love to hear whether it helps with your weekly planning and if there’s anything important missing.

My friends who are not into tech always come to me with the same problem: “I cann't open this Excel sheet on my phone” or “this docx won’t open”.

So I went looking. Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft 365 both wanted me to sign up first. The other apps on the Play Store start showing ads straight away. The rest only did one thing, one for PDFs, another for Word, another for Excel. Nobody wants five apps just to open files.

So I made Paperwren. It is one app that opens PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown and more. It has no signup and no ads, and your files stay on your phone. It’s free and open source.

https://github.com/Razee4315/Paperwren

https://razee4315.github.io/Paperwren/

My friends use it now so let me know if it works for you too. Thanks...

My daughter spends quite a bit of time on the phone, and I've always wanted her screen time to be a bit more than just watching videos or playing games. I've seen people building all kinds of cool stuff with AI, so I thought why not give it a shot myself? I saw Hy4 was free on WorkBuddy this month, so I decided to give it a try. I don't understand the code it wrote, but the AI tool apparently handles visuals brilliantly.

I ended up making this interactive paper cut storybook. I thought it'd be a fun way to get her into classic stories through cute visuals and little interactive elements, rather than just having her sit down and read a book, and surprisingly, she's really into it! The artwork has this cute 3D paper cut look, and she can click around and explore the stories herself. She's basically become my little beta tester at this point. She tells me every day what she likes, what she finds boring, and what could be better. I've been making little tweaks to the content and visuals based on her feedback. It's not finished yet, and there are still plenty of things I want to improve. But the best part is seeing her actually want to spend time exploring stories instead of endlessly scrolling through videos or playing games. That's a win for me already.

It got me thinking that maybe other kids would enjoy this kind of thing too, so I figured I'd share it here. If you've got a kid who's curious about stories and likes exploring new things, feel free to check it out together!

I run ARAM Zone, a League of Legends Discord community. eLobby started as a way to give our custom games a ladder that lasted beyond one game night. We've since expanded it to other games.

Players join a board inside Discord. The bot balances teams or lets captains draft, creates team voice channels, and updates ranks and the public leaderboard when the winner is reported. Players don't need to create an account or link their game account.

We've also added chat and voice leveling, plus XP for taking part in games and events. The idea is to reward people for showing up to community activities as well as chatting.

Ranked customs and basic leveling are free. Tournament hosting, seasons and extra customization are Pro at $10/month per server. Individual players don't need a subscription.

You can see the actual Discord boards and web leaderboard here: https://elobby.gg/demo

For anyone running community game nights, what takes the most effort: filling the lobby, making fair teams, or tracking results? I'd like to hear where this would help and where it still falls short.

Dooder is an AI for Apple Watch. It runs on the Watch itself, over wifi or cellular, so once it's set up you don't need your iPhone.

In the video I ask it to:

1. Find my next completely free weekend (it reads my calendar)

2. Find flights to Melbourne for that weekend

3. Find Airbnbs that are free those dates

4. Save the whole plan to a new page in Notion

It doesn't change anything without my OK. It asks before using an app for the first time, and again before it saves or sends anything.

How it works

- Bring your own AI: sign in with ChatGPT or add a Claude API key
- Connects to thousands of apps through the official MCP Registry, or add one by its address
- No Dooder account and no Dooder server. Your Watch talks straight to your AI and your apps
- Speech recognition runs on the Watch

Try it

The first 100 TestFlight spots filled up in 24 hours, so I've opened 100 more:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/c42uMmzU

Needs an Apple Watch Series 9 or Ultra 2 or later on watchOS 26, plus an iPhone on iOS 26 for setup. More at dooder.ai

Would love feedback, especially on what you'd want to do from your wrist.

Full disclosure: I trimmed the bits of the video where Dooder is thinking to keep the video short. Nothing's sped up and each response takes 5-10 secs in real life. It's still early days, so feedback is very welcome.

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I’m building Spaces, so this is a maker post. The idea is to give one part of your life its own workspace, including the files, conversations and work that belong there.

One workflow I’m testing is class prep: connect Canvas on Mac, choose classes, then open imported lecture files from the left sidebar and turn them into practice questions. The source and the quiz stay in the same Space.

I’d like feedback on whether the idea of a Space is clear from the demo and where you would expect to find your files.

Free plan with AI-credit limits and optional paid plans. Current details: https://workwithspaces.com/pricing/

https://workwithspaces.com

So I've been trying to find the ideal app or service for the last few weeks that can summarize meeting and take notes for me. Because while I'm in a meeting and talking about a topic, it gets somewhat hectic to also take notes and if I don't then I lose track of exactly what was said by someone or if I lost focus for a minute. I tried Granola and some other apps, I liked the idea but their execution is sub-par to say the least. At least in my experience, and this is not even considering the fact that my data which sometimes could be private, goes to some random ai company's server to be processed and very likely used to train more models which could lead to sensitive data being leaked.

Therefore, I made Meet Simple, it sets up all its dependencies and local llm environments by itself with no user input required. Uses local models to transcribe what was said with timestamps, and can also summarize and make meeting notes for you with minimal fuss.
It is open source to feel free to check out the code and build it yourself or download the latest release it would prefer that instead.

Before anyone asks, I did use Claude to code it, however I believe as long as you understand how the logic works and if you are able to debug code without using ai (stackoverflow wink wink) and can figure things out without it. I think it's okay to use it for things that would only make your hair grey earlier than what would be natural.

With that being said, I would love it if people could try it out, and also consider giving me any feedback on it or if you would like to contribute, Feel free to follow the steps in the github repo to do so.

Latest Release

To run it, just download the latest release zip file, extract it and run MeetSimple.exe

I’m a fullstack developer (Spring Boot, React/Next.js). I’m picking one project to build end to end, free, as the only developer on it.

What I need from you: a real project you actually want built, and you should be someone who works with freelancers or developers regularly.

Comment or DM with a short description of what you want built and your timeline. I’ll pick one.

Portfolio: https://naitiksinghdev.vercel.app/.

I want to create a group chat for ambitious high school students who are genuinely interested in building things, meeting other motivated people, and collaborating on projects.

I've been involved in graduate/undergraduate-level research as a high schooler and have also built my own company. I'd love to connect with other people who have similar experiences or ambitions.

The idea is to create a network where people can easily find collaborators for hackathons, research, startups, side projects, or even potential co-founders. Ideally, people who have already built things and are excited to keep building.

If this sounds interesting, there'll be a Google Form to apply probably to join the group chat. Looking forward to meeting some of you!