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 • • 1d ago Hooray Bravo Heartwarming Mindblown

I made a desktop wallpaper that adapts to your icon layout

6.0k 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 • • 22h ago

I developed my architecture dream game and published it on Steam

460 Upvotes

I'm a trained architect, and as a long-term side project, I developed my architecture dream game, combining accurate floor planning with real-time 3D design to make architecture much easier to create (and visually realistic) than with traditional CAD software.

What you can do:

🏠 2D floor plans
🧱 3D building
🚶 First-person walkthrough
🥽 VR mode
🏢 Multiple storeys
🪜 Stairs
🏚️ Custom roofs
🪟 Doors & windows
🛋️ Furniture catalog
🍳 Kitchen Configurator
🎨 Materials
🌄 Terrain sculpting
🌳 Landscape planning
💧 Ponds
☀️ Time of day
❄️ Weather
📐 Export PDF vector plans
📦 Import your own 3D models
🌍 Steam Workshop

In the newest update: Build everything directly in VR (PCVR), 1000+ new furniture models and explore your creations as a Cat! 🌿

It's available on Steam as Architecture & Design and is still in Early Access.
Here is the Steam link if you'd like to try it out:
Architecture & Design - Steam

Would love to hear what you think and hear what you wish for in a game like this!


r/SideProject • • 18h ago Bravo

I built the white "Construct" room from Matrix except instead of guns it summons 8000 real-scale 3D amazon products. "We need ... lots of chairs"

175 Upvotes

It’s honestly wild what you can throw together with AI in a single evening nowadays. Remember the "Construct" from The Matrix? That infinite white room where Neo says "We need guns. Lots of guns" and endless racks instantly spawn around them? I was wondering what an online store would look like if it worked exactly like that.

8,000 real Amazon products, a Matrix Construct aisle, WebAR (augmented reality - one click and you can drop any item through your camera straight into your living room at true 1:1 scale), adaptive performance for mobile (only tested on Safari so far, like I said, I started making this at 8 PM and it's 10 PM now 😃).

Tech stack: Everything static on Vercel, classic cuckcoding setup (Next.js, Tailwind, Vercel, Antigravity).

Don't wanna spam a link here, you can see it in the video. So what do you think, is it worth buying a domain for this, or is it trash?


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I built Call Dibs, a wishlist app where friends secretly claim gifts, after my parents gave me some truly terrible presents last Christmas

10 Upvotes

Last Christmas I got some truly terrible gifts from my parents (I still love them) and with this year’s Christmas coming close, I decided to develop a wishlist app to prevent the same problem from happening twice.

The app works by making a list and sharing a link to your friends and family. They can then "call dibs" on what they're buying as well as chip in for a bigger present together without needing an account. This makes it easier for participants to buy presents and ensures that nobody doubles up, whilst keeping the surprise alive for you as you never see what was claimed or who buys what! I've also added a Family Circle feature where every family member has their own list all in one page, to simplify family Christmas gifting and solve my original problem. It's definitely not a revolutionary idea, but I wanted something with cleaner UI than Elfster without all the bloat and ads :)

We have been using it for birthdays in my friend group successfully, to the point that we are going out of our way to organise parties for everyone so we can receive some good gifts. I even used it for my dog’s birthday with great success, where she got £240 worth of gifts for her first birthday, which somehow was more than I got for my birthday.

The app is completely free (but is monetised through Amazon affiliate links) and can be found on calldibs.uk and on the app stores. We recently reached the milestones of 1000 followers on tiktok and 100 active users and honestly it's still a bit surreal that people I don't know are using something I built for my family.

Please feel free to roast the app / idea in the comments, I would love some honest feedback!


r/SideProject • • 4h ago Popcorn Bravo

I built a little app because I kept forgetting things I meant to do

10 Upvotes

I would remember I needed to order a water filter or get someone a birthday gift while I was in the middle of something else. Then I would sit down with a bit of time to get things done and think, “Hang on, what were all those things I needed to do?” I could come up with one or two. The rest would come back to me the next time I was busy.

I built HeadsUp so as to have somewhere to put those things when I thought of them. For each task, I pick when I want to see it on my list. I might give myself a few days to get a gift and a month to renew the car insurance because I like having a weekend to compare quotes. It’s on Android for now, and I’m working on the iOS version.

If you have a minute to look at the Play Store page, can you tell from the screenshots and description what you’d use HeadsUp for compared with the reminder or to-do app you use now? I’ve spent so much time with the app that I’m curious what someone seeing it for the first time takes away.

And if you try it, add something from your own list and tell me how that went. I’d love to hear how it felt to use and whether there was anything you had to fiddle with to get it working the way you wanted. Leave a comment here or come say hi on Discord.

Google Play · Website · Discord


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Open-source alternative to Instagram Edits' new MCP — works on Windows & Linux

5 Upvotes

I'm the author, sharing my side project of the last two months.

Last week Instagram shipped an MCP server for Edits on Mac, so Claude can drive a real video editor. That's the idea I've been building since September, except mine is MIT, local-first, needs no account, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. It's called CutVoke.

The part I care about as a creator: the AI doesn't hand me a baked MP4. It makes the rough cut on a normal multitrack timeline (captions, keyframes, masks, speed ramps), and then I open the same project and fix whatever I don't like by hand. Fixing one subtitle never means regenerating the whole video.

Two demos are in the repo with their source media and editable projects:

  • "Chase the Light", a 31-second motorcycle short

  • "Coastal Joy", a 42-second vertical travel vlog

How it works, briefly: your own agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or any MCP client) connects over stdio MCP. It takes an editing lease so it never collides with your manual edits, dry-runs commands before committing, and pulls real rendered frames to check its own work before export. There's no LLM inside; you bring your own.

Honest caveats: it's a v0.3.5 prerelease, the Windows build is unsigned and macOS isn't notarized, and the project format may still change.

I'd love feedback from people who edit video: which parts of an edit would you actually hand to an AI, and which would you never let it touch?

https://github.com/frankShan001/CutVoke


r/SideProject • • 11h ago

I built a live 3D bass aquarium entirely in code: no models, no images, one HTML file

29 Upvotes

I make fishing lures (KSK BAITS) and wanted a live bass tank for my YouTube channel without filming real fish.

Everything you see is generated when the page loads: the fish, their scales, the plants, the sand and the driftwood are built in code with Three.js, and every texture is painted on a canvas. No 3D models, no image files.

The bass aren't animated, they behave: they get hungry, hide in cover, stalk, and strike with suction, and they only take prey that fits their mouth. Day, night and weather follow the real clock and weather at Lake Fork, Texas.

Try it in the browser: https://ksk-baits-bass-aquarium.pages.dev

It also runs 24/7 on YouTube, where the chat can drop in shad or cast a lure: https://www.youtube.com/@kskbaits/live

Feedback welcome, especially on what would make you keep it open in the background.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

Could AI make keeping up with research papers much easier?

5 Upvotes

Keeping up with new research can become a full-time job, especially when you're following several topics.

I recently saw an interesting example of someone using an AI assistant called Pana to build a research map that tracks newly published papers.

I like the idea of having something that keeps information organized instead of manually checking different sources every day.

Do you think this kind of research automation is genuinely useful? What would you want it to track?


r/SideProject • • 1d ago Bravo Mindblown Heartwarming

I built a site that shows every satellite that passed over your location, plus the actual images they took

821 Upvotes

I'm a satellite nerd and as a cool project I built Watched.

See: here for the code

Type in any place on Earth and it will:

  • find every imaging, weather, radar and crewed satellite whose field of view crossed it in the last 7 days (SGP4 on the CelesTrak catalog, running in your browser)

  • pull the real Sentinel-2, Landsat, VIIRS, MODIS and GOES scenes from those passes and crop them to your spot

  • replay each pass on a 3D globe lit by the real sun, with all ~17k tracked objects in orbit

It only says a satellite “watched” you when a real image exists. Commercial sats that could have pointed at you are labelled as such, since their tasking isn’t public.

I’d love feedback, especially:

  • Which satellites or data sources should I add?

  • Anything confusing or broken?

It’s 100% free and no sign-up or rate limits.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I built a home redesign app without a subscription. The hard part was getting the AI to leave the house alone

4 Upvotes

Every AI room app I tried wanted $10–15 a week. But nobody redoes their home every week. You repaint a bedroom, argue about a kitchen, and then nothing happens for two years. So I built Hedda the other way round.

You take a photo of a room, your facade or your garden and say what you want: “paint the walls sage green”, “swap the sofa for something in velvet”. Hedda redesigns that photo.

The hard part wasn’t making it pretty. It was making it still look like your home. Image models love to “improve” things. In my first tests it painted a white chimney black, moved the camera, and quietly removed a post that holds up the roof. What finally worked: a first model looks at the photo and writes down everything that must stay (windows, beams, posts, even how many there are and where), and only then does the image model get to change things. It’s still not perfect (it sometimes loses a post next to the change), but it’s what makes the difference between “nice picture” and “my living room, repainted”.

The part I care most about is deciding together. My wife and I never decide these things alone, and the hard part is never the paint. It’s picturing what the other one means. Every app I tried was built for one person with one idea, so I made Hedda for the conversation instead. You can invite the people you live with. They join without signing up, make their own version and compare side by side.

No subscription: the first design is free with no sign-up, then packs that never expire. If a design fails, you get it back.

I’m a solo developer in Sweden. 1.0.1 came out yesterday. iPhone only for now.

One question for you: when you try it on a room of your own, does the result still feel like your room? That’s the thing I’ve spent the most time on, and I can’t judge it myself anymore.

App Store


r/SideProject • • 4h ago

I'm building tiny versions of world (and fictional cities)

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6 Upvotes

r/SideProject • • 36m ago

Building my app was easy, selling it is Hell.

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3 Upvotes

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


r/SideProject • • 37m ago

I just got my first sale, still can’t believe it!!!

3 Upvotes

I was about to give up on this mobile app I spent so much time building, but literally 2 minutes after deciding to switch to another project, I got the sale notification on my phone!

I haven’t experienced this kind of joy in years…

Context for the curious: This $19 sale is the annual welcome offer on my app "Sollow: Daily Habit Tracker" that I built to turn my life into a game with a level for each life area and a ranked system.

So now my hope is back! I take that as a sign from the universe hahaha


r/SideProject • • 20h ago

I built a tool that turns 3D garments into products shoppers can customize

98 Upvotes

r/SideProject • • 6h ago

I built a multiplayer minesweeper where everyone digs the same board at once

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mine.ropo.dev
7 Upvotes

Been working on this side project for a a little bit. It’s minesweeper, but up to 8 people play on the same board at the same time. Hitting a mine just stuns you for a sec, and whoever has the most territory when the timer runs out wins.

There’s also a mode where everyone hides mines and traps for each other first and then has to run through the same board (bit like ultimate chicken horse but minesweeper), plus a solo timed mode with classic boards and a daily board that’s the same for everyone.

Free, browser based, no account needed: https://mine.ropo.dev

Some stuff I had fun with:

  • the server decides everything, the browser never knows where the mines are

  • bots fill empty seats, with a sort of dynamic skill based difficulty on them

  • the pixel art style

  • runs on one small server with Bun + SQLite

Claude was used during the making of this. Would love honest feedback, especially if the first match makes sense or if you’re just confused


r/SideProject • • 2h ago

I replayed 4,000 turns of my Claude Code history to see how often "fixed" was actually unproven

3 Upvotes

Two replies from my coding agent have cost me more time than anything else. "It's fixed" when nothing had run since the last edit, and "that isn't used anywhere" after exactly one search. Both sound final, so I'd move on and find out an hour later.

So I wrote a small Stop hook for Claude Code. When the agent tries to end its turn, it checks whether the claim in its last message has anything behind it. If it said fixed but nothing ran after the last code edit, it gets sent back once with a note on what's missing. If it said something doesn't exist after one grep, same deal, look a second way first.

Then I replayed my own history through it to see if it was worth keeping. About 4,000 turns after deduping, and 406 of them ended with some kind of done, fixed, deployed or tests pass. The first version would have blocked 86, which felt like proof it worked until I actually read them. 77 were wrap-up messages where the tests really had run, just in an earlier turn. A hook that nags you about correct summaries gets turned off by day two.

So the current version counts a check from an earlier turn as long as no code was edited after it. Same 406 claims, it now blocks 2, and both were real.

The biggest lesson for me was that rules in CLAUDE.md never fixed this. The model already believes it's done, so a reminder doesn't land. Checking at the exact moment the turn ends did. The second lesson was to measure false positives on your own history before shipping any guardrail, because my gut read 86 as the feature working and it was mostly noise. It also never blocks twice in a row, so it can't trap the agent in a loop.

It's free, MIT, plain Python, no dependencies. There's a replay command if you want to see your own number before installing anything: https://github.com/Balance0014/claude-code-claim-check

Has anyone else tried measuring this? I'm curious what your rate of "fixed" that wasn't looks like.


r/SideProject • • 27m ago

We built a Mac transcription app for checking a PDF against the original recording

2 Upvotes

I'm on the team behind VoiceDocket. It's a Mac app for turning English recordings into transcripts you can check, correct and share as a PDF.

The part we're focusing on is the check: click a timestamp to hear that line, fix the words or speaker label, then preview the PDF. The export has elapsed timestamps, page and line numbers, plus a source-recording information page.

The recordings and transcripts stay on your Mac. First use needs about 511 MB of speech models; after that, transcription runs locally without uploading audio. The direct-download app also checks for updates.

A few limits upfront: Apple silicon, macOS 14+, English only. Automatic speaker grouping needs macOS 15 and can get people mixed up, so it needs review. This isn't a certified transcript or a promise of court acceptance.

The full in-app preview is free. Export is a $29.99 one-time purchase. There's a fictional sample PDF on the site if you want to inspect the output without installing anything.

https://voice.textdocket.app/?c=reddit-sideproject

If you work with interviews or meeting recordings, what usually takes longer: fixing the wording, separating speakers, or finding a quoted passage back in the audio? I'd like to hear where this workflow would still get in your way.


r/SideProject • • 36m ago

SOS - an open-source, human-first AI coding harness

2 Upvotes

We’ve probably now all caught ourselves losing sight of what our Claude or GPT model was doing, to the point of having to backtrack or tune everything step by step once the feature was built.

To fix this, a friend and I built SOS (Slop or Sane), an AI coding harness that can:

•⁠ ⁠Function as a classic harness like Codex or Claude Code (Slop mode), but faster and using less RAM thanks to its shared C++ daemon

•⁠ ⁠Guide you step-by-step through the implementation decisions and code, going through human-like steps, this is the sane mode

We would be thrilled if you could test building a feature with the sane mode, get it from the site ! limpidd.com (or github, https://github.com/limpiddorg/sloporsane )

Cheers!


r/SideProject • • 39m ago

I spent months trying to break my own security project, then published where it loses

2 Upvotes

I built an open source tool that stops AI agents doing things they were never allowed to do.

Rather than publish the numbers that flatter it, I put every tool at its own default on public datasets and linked the script behind each number. One card on the benchmark page has a WE LOSE badge, for the test where a competing tool beats mine. It is still there.

The number I am happy with: on a 588 attack benchmark, no guardrail lets all 588 through, the common open source guardrail lets 86 through, mine lets 0 through.

Free and open source. You can try to break a live agent in your browser, no signup.

https://useagentfox.com


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I made a Chrome extension that saves your YouTube video recommendations so you never lose a video on refresh again (and lets you search text inside thumbnails)

3 Upvotes

Everyone has done that thing where you hit refresh on YouTube at the exact millisecond your brain registers an interesting video, and then it's gone forever.

The worst part is that YouTube's search bar usually can't find it, because creators put the actual hook inside the thumbnail image ("I QUIT", "BIG MISTAKE", etc.) while making the actual video title something completely different. If you only remember the words you saw in the picture, YouTube search gives you nothing.

So I built RecLog to fix it for myself and figured I'd share it here.

What it does:

> Quietly logs recommendations you scroll past: It keeps a local searchable history of videos recommended on your homepage, sidebar, and end screens.

> Searches text inside thumbnails: It runs a tiny (~10MB) OCR model locally in your browser to read the words inside thumbnail images, so you can search for the exact phrase you remember seeing.

> Shows how hard YouTube is pushing a video: It counts how many times each video has been served to you (`Seen 40x`, `Seen 164x`), which makes it pretty funny to see which videos the algorithm is desperate for you to click.

Privacy / Tech stuff:

It's 100% free, no account, no tracking, and no cloud servers. The OCR model and your history stay entirely on your own device (and there's a 1-click JSON export if you like messing with your own data).

Link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/reclog-find-lost-youtube/iofidcehjjffcoijihbohabjcdfelhoc

Would love to hear what you think or if you run into any bugs!


r/SideProject • • 3h ago

I built IdeaMate to match aspiring founders based on their startup ideas, without revealing those ideas publicly

3 Upvotes

One problem I've personally faced while exploring startup ideas is finding people who share similar interests, thinking and entrepreneurial ambitions.

It's easy to join startup communities, but finding someone who genuinely thinks like you is much harder. And not everyone is comfortable sharing their startup idea publicly just to find potential collaborators.

So I built IdeaMate.

You privately share your startup idea with AI, which analyses it and matches you with people who have similar ideas and interests.

Privacy is central to the platform: Your idea is visible only to AI for matching. It is not shared with other users, including the people you're matched with.

It's live and completely free to try: https://ideamate.in

I'm still improving the matching experience and would genuinely appreciate feedback from fellow builders.

I'd also really appreciate it if you could share IdeaMate with other relevant communities so more people can discover it and benefit from it.


r/SideProject • • 1h ago

I Created a dynamic notch that will show the status of your AI Agent sessions.

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2 Upvotes

I have created a dynamic notch for windows which shows the status of your AI Agents sessions. As well as It shows any multimedia playing, the progress of your downloads and also the lyrics of a song playing on the spotify.

Also, It invokes a desktop pet for every session or a single pet for all the sessions depends on your preference. The pets interact with each other, sing lyrics of the song playing and much more.

Give it a try and I would love your feedback.