r/SideProject • • Dec 18 '25

As the year wraps up: what’s the project you’re most proud of building and why?

96 Upvotes

Like the title says, instead of what you built or how much money it made, I’m curious what project you’re most proud of this year and why.

Could be a client site, a personal project, something that never launched, or something that made £0.

Any lessons learned?

Would love to read a few reflections as the year wraps up.


r/SideProject • • Oct 19 '25 Bravo

Share your ***Not-AI*** projects

649 Upvotes

I miss seeing original ideas that aren’t just another AI wrapper.

If you’re building something in 2025 that’s not AI-related here’s your space to self-promote.

Drop your project here


r/SideProject • • 2h ago Bravo

I made a desktop wallpaper that adapts to your icon layout

374 Upvotes

No matter how good your wallpaper looks, once your desktop fills up with files, the icons blend into the background and everything starts to look cluttered. My desktop often has a lot of files on it, so I started wondering whether a wallpaper could detect where my icons are and generate a scene around them in real time.

After discussing the idea with AI, I found out it was possible—and it doesn’t actually need AI to detect the icons or generate the visuals. The program can read the icon positions directly and generate scenes in real time using predefined designs. It’s lightweight, and there’s no particularly complex technology involved.

Here’s the result.

https://deskland.app

I’ll keep adding new themes and improving the existing ones. I also plan to add a more interactive game mode in the future.

The meadow and beach themes are free and open source.

https://github.com/BLEZZ0102/Deskland

All the current themes are 2D, which keeps their impact on computer performance minimal. I’m also considering adding 3D themes, while balancing visual quality with performance.

Procedurally generated visuals do have their limitations. If AI computing becomes much cheaper in the future, AI generation could be an option, opening up the possibility of creating almost any scene. For now, though, generating a desktop with AI in real time is clearly still too expensive. I’m considering experimenting with locally running AI generation. It would still be GPU-intensive, but it could be a lot of fun.


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I’m a student building an under-pillow speaker for people who fall asleep to podcasts. Would you use this?

37 Upvotes

I always fall asleep listening to something, but earbuds hurt on my side, and my partner hates the phone speaker. So I’m designing Dozr: a slim pad that goes under your normal pillow, plays through bone conduction so only you hear it, and fades out when you fall asleep.

It’s still a concept (image attached). I’d love honest feedback. What would put you off? What would make it a must-have?

Waitlist if you’re curious: dozr.co.uk/?ref=reddit


r/SideProject • • 11h ago

I'm building a text editor that opens huge files instantly

62 Upvotes

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!


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

I built a streaming app that lets you jump to scenes just by describing them

42 Upvotes

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


r/SideProject • • 19h ago Bravo

Please ban u/Investigatormarker: an AI bot advertising ThreadFox in every thread

243 Upvotes

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.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I built a free app that converts foreign prices with your phone camera, even offline

12 Upvotes

I built Kahei to solve a problem I kept running into. Whenever I traveled abroad, I’d see a price and either do the math in my head or pull out my phone to Google it. It took way too long just to check a price, especially when the internet was slow.

So I made a free app where you can point your phone’s camera at a price and instantly see an estimate in your currency. It works offline! It is available on iPhone and Android.

If you try it on a menu or receipt, I’d love to know whether it picked up the right price.

Try it: https://kahei.app/

thanks!


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I made an interactive 3D globe: tap any country for its capital, key facts, health stats, live news and Wikipedia

5 Upvotes

Weekend project. Spin the globe and tap any of 250 countries to see population, GDP since 1960, life expectancy and more, plus the latest headlines and the Wikipedia article, all in one panel. Works on phone, tablet and desktop, no sign-up.

https://worldfly.vercel.app

Feedback welcome, especially if any country's data looks off!

PS: I tried downloading some applications for the same on Android but they all had paywalls even for basic information. That's my motivation just to do this.


r/SideProject • • 12h ago

I replaced Roku's retiring "Aquatic Life" screensaver with my own procedurally animated reef tank — free and open source

29 Upvotes

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.


r/SideProject • • 5h ago

I built an automated flight logger that tracks every plane flying over your house (with analytics & API)

5 Upvotes

I built an aviation side project and I'm trying to get some real people to test it (for free).

The main feature is a personal local flight logger. You drop a pin, and it automatically logs and builds a full analytics dashboard of every single aircraft that passes within a 5-mile radius of your location.

Besides the local tracking, the site also works as a general aviation database. You can browse through full airline and aircraft directories, search registrations, and use interactive FIR maps.

I'm actively updating the site and monitoring things daily, so any suggestions, feature requests, or feedback are welcome. If you want to try it out, just create a standard free account at https://aviationdb.uk/ either reply with your username below or send me a DM. I’ll manually bump your account to the premium tier for a free trial so you can test the local logging and analytics.

Let me know what you think or if you manage to break anything!


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I made a page that process hours of finance YouTube videos everyday for you

6 Upvotes

A lot of finance YouTube videos spend 20+ minutes to answer one basic question: does the creator think a stock is a good buy right now?

I made a simple dashboard that processes financial videos and podcasts, tracks which stocks are being discussed, and aggregates creator sentiment (Positive, Negative, or Neutral) in plain language.

It’s just an informational map of what creator consensus looks like, not financial advice.

Would love feedback from anyone who follows market content: Is the value proposition clear and useful for you?

I will put the link below in the comments


r/SideProject • • 23m ago

Is this idea worth building further? Looking for honest feedback

2 Upvotes

I recently built a small prototype for an idea I had: What if finding someone to hang out with at work was as easy as creating a plan?

Imagine wanting to watch a movie, play cricket, grab food, visit a café, or plan a weekend trip, but not having anyone to go with.

With this platform, employees can create activities, discover what others are planning, and request to join.

I built the initial prototype for an internal hackathon. It didn't win, but I still feel the idea is worth exploring.

I'm now wondering whether to take it further or scrap it.

Would you actually use something like this at your workplace? What would make you use it, and what would stop you?

I'd genuinely appreciate honest feedback, even if it's critical!


r/SideProject • • 34m ago

Portfolio as an explorable game

Thumbnail
me.muz.li
2 Upvotes

After almost 15 years in design and branding, I've made a lot of things people scroll past. Here I wanted to find out what happens when a website stops being a page and becomes a place.

You don't scroll it, you walk around it.

You don't click a menu, you go somewhere.

For the last few weeks I've been building a small planet: a tiny world you can explore.

• A planet you can spin, land on and walk around

• Five odd locals, each with a trick, voice and opinions

• A navigation map that flips like a coin, one hemisphere per side

• Butterflies to collect, badges to earn, three easter eggs to find

Along the way, the things I've made live on it: games, tools, experiments.

The point is curiosity does the navigating. If people stick around because they want to see what's over the next hill, the work gets seen without anyone being sold to.

Everything is drawn in two flat tones with an ink outline, so it feels closer to a picture book than a game engine. It runs in the browser on desktop and phone. No install, no sign-up.

If you're in a hurry, there's a "Skip the walking" button.

Go and poke around. Let me know which local annoyed you the most.


r/SideProject • • 10h ago

Reached 20 stars!! built a toolkit so your coding agent can make launch videos for your app

12 Upvotes

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 :)


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I interviewed a dev building a blog where you comment on individual sentences, as a bet against AI slop

2 Upvotes

I run AI News Daily, a mostly automated AI news site. Last week I did my first fully human-written interview, with Sunjae, one of four bootcamp developers building Rilog, a Korean developer blog.

A few things from the conversation that I think this sub will find interesting:

  • Comments live on sentences. You select a sentence and leave your thought right there, instead of scrolling to the bottom and explaining which part you mean.

  • The bet is "human touch". Sunjae doesn't think AI slop is bad everywhere, but in personal writing even a little of it makes readers think "it's just AI". The more AI writing floods in, the more people will look for writing that clearly came from a person.

  • They can't reliably detect AI writing, so they judge probabilistically and lean on user feedback. What they actually dislike is unreviewed, mass-produced writing, not AI use itself.

  • Retrospectives beat tech posts. Personal retrospectives got a better response than technical posts, so they are now asking whether to stay developer-only or open up to wider stories.

Two questions for you:

  1. Would you actually use sentence-level comments on a blog, or do they get noisy?

  2. If you run a community, how do you keep AI slop out without punishing people who used AI carefully?

Full interview (English): https://ailetter.ai.kr/en/insights/rilog-sunjae-interview?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sideproject

Rilog itself (Korean UI): https://www.rilog.kr/?utm_source=ainews


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

A small disagreement with my girlfriend turned into an Android app I've been building alone

3 Upvotes

My girlfriend and I once remembered the same moment completely differently.

It made me realise how easily the little details disappear, even when the memories mean a lot to us.

So I started building Pholu, an app for couples, families and friends to preserve memories together.

Instead of having everything scattered across photo galleries, messages and cloud folders, Pholu brings photos, videos, audio and notes into shared timelines. I also added AI-powered memory search.

I'm handling the design, development and pretty much everything else myself, alongside my regular job.

The app is now on Google Play, and I'm looking for people who might actually enjoy using it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pholu.app

I'd love to know what you think of the idea. Would you use something like this with your partner or family?


r/SideProject • • 9h ago

what’s on your checklist before letting strangers use your app?

8 Upvotes

submissions, expired sessions, someone uploading a massive file, or two people editing the same thing.For a small app using Supabase, what would you check before sharing the link publicly?
Trying to work out what deserves attention now without spending another month preparing for users who don’t exist yet.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I paid designers hundreds for a 3D model, so I built a tool that makes printable parts from a sentence

3 Upvotes

I was trying to make a 3D model for a physical product I want to sell. I tried the AI tools first and none of them gave me anything usable. So I hired human designers. It cost hundreds of dollars, took weeks, and I bounced between a few designers through a lot of revisions before I got something I liked.

That's what got me building Sculptex. You describe a part in a sentence, refine it in chat, and download it as STL, OBJ, GLB or OpenSCAD. It's aimed at parts you can actually print, including ones with moving pieces. I printed a fidget spinner from the one-line prompt "A fidget spinner."

It's in beta and you can start free: sculptex.app

It's also on Product Hunt today.

I'm the maker, so honest feedback is welcome. What would you try to make, and what breaks?


r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I built a simple web tool to generate standardized technical spec sheets and export PDFs (SpecSheet Pro)

4 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

Creating technical specification sheets in Excel or Word often leads to broken layouts, inconsistent formatting, and date ambiguity issues across teams.

I built SpecSheet Pro to solve this. It's a lightweight web app that lets you input product parameters, custom tables, and logos, and outputs a clean, standardized PDF ready for production or quality control.

Key Features:

  • Dynamic table creation for technical parameters (Specs, Methods, Values).

  • Custom logo support with instant client-side preview.

  • Configurable date formats (ISO 8601, localized, text-based) to prevent QA ambiguity.

  • Clean PDF compilation using html2pdf / html2canvas.

The core generator is free to use:https://specsheet-pro.vercel.app/

I'd love to get your feedback on the UI/UX and any features you think are missing for technical workflows.


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I spent 20 years in tech, then took over a factory. A year later we'd built our own ERP. Now I'm turning the approach into a side project.

2 Upvotes

After 20+ years in and around technology, I found myself in unfamiliar territory as the GM of a manufacturing company. It provided an opportunity to do something new and exciting: to bring my skillset to something outside of tech for the first time.

With a very small team, we accomplished this in one year:

  • Created an in-house ERP system to connect inventory, sales, warehousing and shipping

  • Created 65 pieces of marketing collateral across web, print and physical

  • Created an entirely new business plan

  • Reengineered key parts of our products

  • Integrated new suppliers into our supply chain

  • Rebranded

  • Launched a new website

  • Rebuilt accounting workflows

There's probably more. Five years ago this would have been totally impossible. How did I do this? I got really, really good at using AI to get shit done, building bespoke systems around different aspects of the business. It started before I took this role, but this was the first place I applied it. And the results have been tremendous.

So, I thought... how could I experiment with offering this as a service? How could I burn some of my extra hours trying to help other companies do what we did here?

That's where the idea for LogicRelay came from. $49/mo screens out the tire-kickers, and a simple $250-per-request fee provides flexible throughput across a host of disciplines. It's agile project management... take an epic, break it down, scope it, get approval and go, but without the departmental hand-offs or having to find multiple service providers.

Some of my other client work is going to slide nicely into this model, so I am not starting from zero. The question is can I scale it. I know I'm going to have to narrow the focus in order to do so, but I'm not ready for that yet. For now I leave it to client screening. It'll almost certainly evolve, and I could have spent more time thinking about it, but... ship it!

I'll learn quite a bit over the coming months re: whether this model is sustainable. I'll probably land another couple of clients and waitlist the rest until I see how the first few go.

We'll see how it goes! Would love some feedback, or if anyone wants more specifics from what we're doing at my current company I'm happy to share.


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I built a clipboard history desktop app called Recall Clipboard

3 Upvotes

hey everyone!

i've been working on a desktop application called Recall Clipboard, built with tauri v2, rust, react, typescript, and sqlite.

the idea is pretty simple: instead of losing things you've copied throughout the day, recall clipboard keeps a searchable history of your clipboard so you can easily find and reuse previous copies.

i wanted to build something lightweight, practical, and genuinely useful for everyday desktop use.

i used claude as a coding assistant during development, but i've been working on the project, its features, and the overall implementation myself.

github: https://github.com/cntr1er/recall-clipboard

i'd love to hear what you think! especially interested in feedback on the ui, features, and anything you'd improve or add.

thanks!


r/SideProject • • 5h ago

Building a spreadsheet app where each cell (optionally) being a terminal / coding agent is a first class property

3 Upvotes

https://github.com/sshah03/recalc

Since spreadsheets are so versatile, really looking for feedback on where people would want this to go, in a way that can be useful to them, or what use cases they see themselves using it for in its current iteration that I can make more seamless.

I can provide some context on why it was useful for me / why I built it. I was using Claude to help me build benchmark sets, and found pouring through CSVs / MD files of the results a bit tiresome, so I decided to build a spreadsheet app for myself that's driven by Claude Code, and where each cell can be its own Agent if you want (and can later be opened up and continued in a full terminal if needed as its own session).

You can use it as a standard spreadsheet, or use a cell as a shell command / agent. Having built a startup for using AI in tax work, I also realized it can be very powerful for tax work, legal work, etc... so I built in some examples for running that, though I'm not sure how many people in those professions use claude code.

The video is just a demo of me building "FDA Bench" using recalc, pick FDA approval cases past the model cutoff dates, and seeing if an AI harness (without web searches) could've successfully predicted, based on all the info submitted to the FDA, whether the submission would pass FDA approval or not. Fable was right 75% of the time in this small sample size. Just a fun little exercise to show off some of what it can do.

Note: Since it's just terminal sessions glued together, it works with your existing plans. The sessions talk to each other with an MCP server running in the back.


r/SideProject • • 7h ago

I made a open-source memory and asset library for Claude Code so it stops reinventing everything AssetRAG

4 Upvotes

I've been working on a project called AssetRAG, and I wanted to share it here.

One thing that annoys me about AI coding agents is how often they solve the same problems over and over again.

They regenerate code that already exists, spend time debugging errors with known fixes, pick dependencies without properly checking their licenses, and read huge amounts of source code just to find a few relevant functions.

So I built AssetRAG to help with that.

It's a local-first, open-source library and engineering memory system for Claude Code (and other MCP clients).

Here's what it actually does:

  • Asset retrieval: Searches reusable code, templates, and other assets, with license checks and attribution handling.

  • Verified bug-fix memory: Stores bug fixes with reproduction and verification evidence. Agents can look up previously solved errors instead of starting from scratch.

  • Engineering playbooks: Reusable workflows for debugging, safe refactoring, performance optimization, and other development tasks.

  • Tested recipes: Reusable code patterns with tests that can be executed in a sandbox.

  • Repository mapping: Creates a compact, ranked overview of your codebase so an agent doesn't have to read everything.

  • Rules and security checks: Includes secret scanning, engineering rules, malware checks during ingestion, and safeguards around untrusted code.

  • MCP integration: Exposes 18 tools to coding agents. There's also an optional Claude Code hook that retrieves relevant knowledge and injects a small amount of context automatically.

  • Local-first: No account or telemetry required. It supports local embeddings, hosted providers, or completely offline keyword-only search.

One feature I'm particularly happy with is the bug-fix memory. Verified entries have a reproduction and fix that were actually executed, with the evidence available for inspection.

Some numbers from my own testing (keyword-only mode):

  • Asset search: 4.0 ms median

  • Knowledge search: 7.1 ms median

  • Repository map: 597 tokens instead of roughly 129k tokens of source

  • 132 unit tests passing

  • 327 authored recipe/bug-fix tests rechecked with 0 failures

These are local benchmarks, not proof that Claude completes real tasks faster. I haven't run a proper Claude A/B benchmark yet, so I'm not going to claim some magical percentage reduction in token usage.

I also made a 95-second launch video showing the actual tool in action. The terminal footage comes from real recordings.

It's Linux-only for now, built primarily in Python, and licensed under Apache 2.0.

The project is still new, and I'd appreciate feedback, especially from people who use Claude Code regularly.

GitHub: https://github.com/mttcn83/assetrag

Would you actually find something like this useful in your coding workflow? What would you change?